POSTMODERN TRANSITION PROGRAM

Fourth International: Draft manifesto of revolutionary Marxism in the age of capitalist ecological and social destruction

Fourth International
7 May, 2024



LONG READ

First published at Fourth.International.

The leadership of the Fourth International has approved, as a first draft, an Ecosocialist Manifesto, which will be discussed at our next World Congress in February 2025 (see below).

This document is based in our belief that an ecosocialist society, liberated from class, gender, race or colonial domination is needed, and can be achieved only through a revolution. The Manifesto tries to assess the best ways and means towards this aim.

We would be interested to get comments, criticisms and arguments of relevant Scientists, Marxist thinkers and significant social and political movements. We do not pretend to have the monopoly of truth, and believe that dialogue with other radical and revolutionary forces is necessary, in fact indispensable, if we want to move forward in the struggle.
Break with capitalist growth, for an ecosocialist alternative

Draft adopted by International Committee February 2024
Introduction

INTR.1.1. This Manifesto is a document of the Fourth International, founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky and his comrades to save the legacy of the October Revolution from Stalinist disaster. Rejecting sterile dogmatism, The Fourth International has integrated the challenges of social movements and the ecological crisis into its thinking and practice. Its forces are limited, but they are present on every continent and have actively contributed to the resistance to Nazism, May 68 in France, solidarity with anti-colonial struggles (Algeria, Vietnam), the growth of the anti-globalization movement and the development of ecosocialism.

The Fourth International does not see itself as the sole vanguard; it participates, to the extent of its strength, in broad anti-capitalist formations. Its objective is to contribute to the formation of a new International, of a mass character, of which it would be one of the components.

INTR.1.2. Our era is one of a double historic crisis: the crisis of the socialist alternative in the face of the multifaceted crisis of capitalist “civilization”.

INTR.1.3 If the Fourth International is publishing this Manifesto in 2025, it is because we are convinced that the process of ecosocialist revolution at different territorial levels, but with a planetary dimension, is more necessary than ever: it is now a question not only of putting an end to the social and democratic regressions that accompany global capitalist expansion, but also of saving humanity from an ecological catastrophe without precedent in human history. These two objectives are inextricably linked.

INTR.1.4. However, the socialist project which forms the basis of our proposals requires a broad re-foundation nourished by the pluralistic assessment of experiences and by the major movements fighting against all forms of domination and oppression (class, gender, dominated national communities, etc.). The socialism we propose is radically different from the models that dominated the last century or of any statist or dictatorial regime: it is a revolutionary project, radically democratic, nourished by the contribution of feminist, ecological, anti-racist, anti-colonialist, antimilitarist and LGBTQ+ struggles.

INTR.1.5. We have been using the term ecosocialism for some decades now because we are convinced that the global threats and challenges posed by the ecological crisis must permeate all struggles within/against the existing globalized order and require a reformulation of the socialist project. The relationship with our planet, overcoming the “metabolic rift” (Marx) between human societies and their living environment, and the respect for the planet’s ecological equilibrium are not just chapters in our programme and strategy, but their common thread.

INTR.1.6. The need to update the analyses of revolutionary Marxism, has always inspired the action and thought of the Fourth International. We are continuing this approach in our work on writing this Ecosocialist Manifesto: we want to help to formulate a revolutionary perspective capable of confronting the challenges of the 21st century. A perspective that draws inspiration from social and ecological struggles, and from the genuinely anti-capitalist critical reflections that are developing around the world.
1. The objective necessity of an ecosocialist, antiracist, antimilitarist, anticolonialist and feminist revolution

1.1. Capital triumphs, but its triumph plunges it into the insurmountable contradictions highlighted by Marx. Faced with these, Rosa Luxembourg issued her warning in 1915: “Socialism or barbarism”. The timeliness of this warning is burning than ever, as the catastrophe growing around us is unprecedented. To the plagues of war, colonialism, exploitation, racism, authoritarianism, oppressions of all kinds, there is in fact added a new scourge, which exacerbates all the others: the accelerated destruction by capital of the natural environment on which the survival of humankind depends.

1.2. Scientists identify eight global indicators of ecological sustainability. Danger limits are estimated for seven of them. Due to the capitalist logic of accumulation, seven at least have already been crossed: (climate, functional integrity of ecosystems, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, groundwater freshwater, surface freshwater and natural ecosystem area, six of which even exceed the “ceiling” (only the climate does not exceed this). The poor are the main victims, especially in poor countries.

1.3. Under the whiplash of competition, big industry and finance enhance their despotic hold on people and the Earth. The destruction continues, despite the warning cries of science. The craving for profit, like an automaton, demands always more markets and always more goods, hence more exploitation of labour force and plundering of natural resources.

1.4. Legal capital, so-called criminal capital and bourgeois politics are closely intertwined. The Earth is bought on credit by the banks, the multinationals and the rich. Governments increasingly strangle human and democratic rights through brutal repression and technological control. A new fascism offers its services to save the system through lies, racism, sexism, xenophobia and social demagogy.

1.5. It is an understatement to say that the limits of sustainability are also crossed on the social level.

1.6. With their yachts, their jets, their swimming pools, their exclusive massive golf courses, their many SUVs, their space tourism, their jewellery, their haute couture and their luxurious homes in the four corners of the world, the richest 1% owns as much as 50% of the world’s population. The “trickle down theory” is a myth. It is towards the rich that wealth “trickles”, not the opposite. Poverty is increasing even in “developed” countries. labour incomes are squeezed ruthlessly, social protections – where they exist – are dismantled. The world capitalist economy floats on an ocean of debt, exploitation and inequalities.

1.7. The unfair distribution of resources generates environmental disasters among different ethnic-racial groups. For example, in developed and often in developing capitalist societies, poor and racialized people are the ones who usually inhabit the territories most affected by pollution, with higher concentration of rubbish, as well as risk areas lacking urban planning such as slopes and hills. Environmental racism is another face of the exclusion that capitalism imposes on racialized and poor people.

1.8. Inequalities and discrimination affect women in particular, who continue to provide most domestic and care work, whether it is free or paid. They receive only 35% of labour income. In some regions of the world (China, Russia, Central Asia), their share is declining, sometimes significantly. Beyond work, women are under attack on all fronts as women - from sexist and sexual violence to the right to food, the right to education, the right to be respected and the right to control their own bodies.

1.9. While old people of the working classes (and also some of the “middle class”) are discarded, the lives of future generations are generally mutilated in advance. Most parents of the working classes no longer believe that their children will live better than they do. A growing number of young people observe with dread, rage, sadness and grief, the organized destruction of their world, raped, gutted, drowned in concrete, engulfed in the cold waters of selfish calculation: the programmed destruction of their future.

1.10. The scourges of famine, food insecurity and malnutrition had receded at the end of the 20th century; they are now burgeoning again as a result of a catastrophic convergence of neoliberalism, militarism and climate change: almost one in ten people are hungry, almost one in three suffer from food insecurity, more than three billion cannot afford a healthy diet. One hundred and fifty million children under the age of five are stunted by hunger.

1.11. The hope of a peaceful world in the short term evaporates. More than 30 countries in the world are or have recently been in wars of considerable dimensions, including Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Congo (RD) and Myanmar. The climate crisis itself, weather phenomena, and the resulting intense migratory flows are fuelling many conflicts around the globe. The suffering, displacement and death of populations is tremendous.

1.12. While imperialisms squabble, urgent measures for climate transition and a sustainable future are called into question. Wars, besides being calamitous in terms of human lives, attacking women’s bodies, using rape as an instrument of terror and dehumanizing collective life, are harmful to the planet we live on. They destroy habitats, cause deforestation, poison the soils, the waters and the air, and are major sources of carbon emissions.

1.13. The brutal Russian war against Ukraine in 2022 and the new level of ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the Gaza-war 2023/24 against the Palestinian people are major crimes against humanity. Both cases confirm the barbarian nature of capitalism today. The Russian imperialist aggression against Ukraine in 2022 has fostered geopolitical tensions on a global scale. It confirms the entry in a new era of inter-imperialist competition for global hegemony, with the US and its allies on the one side, China and its allies on the other side. Land, energy and mineral resources are an important stake of this inter-imperialist competition.

1.14. Everyone could have a good life on Earth, but capitalism is an exploitative, macho, racist, warlike, authoritarian and deadly mode of predation. Productivism is destructivism. In two centuries, it has led humanity into a deep ecosocial impasse.

1.15. Climate change is the most dangerous aspect of ecological destruction, it is a threat to human life without precedent in history. The Earth is in danger of becoming a biological wasteland uninhabitable for billions of poor people who are not responsible for this disaster. To stop this catastrophe, we must halve global carbon dioxide and methane emissions before 2030, and cancel them before 2050. So, as a priority banish fossil fuels, agribusiness, the meat industry and hyper-mobility… that is to say produce less globally.

1.16. On the one hand, the madness of capitalist accumulation confronts humanity with the urgent need of a global degrowth in final energy consumption and, therefore, in material production and transportation. On the other hand, three billion people, mostly in the Global South1 , live in appalling conditions, due to capitalism and imperialism. Social justice demands that certain types of production grow to fulfil their huge unsatisfied needs: good health systems, decent houses, good food, good education, public transport, clean water, social security for all…

1.17. Is there a way out of this contradiction? Yes, there is. It is possible for humans to live well while consuming far less than before, thanks to technological advances in medicine, building, energy efficiency, among others. The climate impact of production aimed at satisfying human needs -especially when democratically planned and assumed by the public sector in a context of social equality - is much lower than that of production aimed at satisfying the needs of the rich through GDP growth and blind market competition for profit. The richest 1% emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the poorest 50%. The richest 10% is responsible for more than 50% of the CO2 emissions. The poor emit much less than 2-2,3t CO2 per person and per year (the average volume to reach in 2030 if we want to reach net zero emissions in 2050 with a 50% probability). Providing them with what they need would have a limited ecological impact. In fact, stopping the catastrophe needs a society that provides well-being and guarantees equality like never before. A desirable perspective, but the 1% rich should divide their emissions by thirty in a few years. Yet they refuse to make even the slightest effort! On the contrary: they want ever more privileges!

1.18. Governments have pledged to stay below +1.5°C, to maintain biodiversity, to achieve so-called “sustainable development” and to respect the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and capacities” in the ecological crisis,... while producing ever more goods, using ever more energy. It is excluded that these combined promises will be respected by capital. The facts show this:

1.18.1. - Thirty-three years after the Earth Summit in Rio (1992), the global energy mix is still completely dominated by fossil fuels (84% in 2020). The total production of fossil fuel has increased by 62% passing from 83 Terawatt-hour (TWh) in 1992 to 136 TWh in 2021 renewables add to the mainly fossil energy system, offering more capacities and new markets to capitalists.2

1.18.2. - With the energy crisis unleashed after the pandemic and deepened by the Russian imperialist war on Ukraine, all capitalist powers revived coal, oil, natural gas (including shale gas), and nuclear power.

1.18.3. - The main force historically responsible for climatic shift, US imperialism has enormous means to fight against the catastrophe, but its political representatives criminally subordinate this fight to the protection of their world hegemony, when they do not simply deny it.

1.18.4. - The measures big polluters implement under the label “decarbonization” not only fail to address the magnitude of the climate crisis but also accelerate extractivism, mostly in the dominated countries, but also in the North and in the oceans, at the expense of the populations and the ecosystems.

1.18.5. - This so-called “decarbonization” exacerbates imperialist land grabbing and exploitation of labour in the South, with the complicity of the local bourgeoisies (as exemplified by different investment projects based on the use of solar and wind energy, especially in “free economic zones” of poor countries, in order to produce “green hydrogen” aimed at supplying industries in developed countries).

1.18.6. - “Carbon markets”, “carbon compensation”, “biodiversity compensations” and “market mechanisms”, based on the understanding of nature as capital, weigh on the least responsible, the poor, in particular the indigenous people, the racialized people and the peoples of the South in general.

1.19. Valid in theory, abstract concepts such as “Circular economy”, “resilience”, “energy transition”, “biomimicry” become hollow formulas in practice as soon as they are used in the service of capitalist productivism. If there is no plan implemented by society as a whole for the conversion of production, then technical improvements (e.g. to make energy production cheaper) often have a rebound effect3 : a reduction in the price of energy generally leads to higher energy and material consumption.

1.20. In the face of the climate crisis, the capitalist fetishism of accumulation will ultimately leave only two options: deploy sorcerer’s apprentice technologies (nuclear, carbon capture-sequestration, geoengineering…)… or let “nature” eliminate a few billion poor people in poor countries.

1.21. Politically, the impotence and injustice of green capitalism play into the hands of a fossil, conspiratorial, colonialist, racist, violently macho and LGBTphobic neo-fascism, which is not put off by this second possibility. A secteur of the wealthy is marching towards a huge crime against humanity, cynically betting that their wealth will protect them, letting the poor die.

1.22. Neoliberal “green” capitalism and the climate-negationist far-right are not the same thing, the latter being much worse, but none of these regimes could prevent global warming from continuing, with dire consequences, and the first feeds the second. Although the victims are more numerous in poor countries, the rich ones will also suffer dramatic losses. World capitalism is not progressing gradually towards peace and sustainable development, it is advancing backwards and with great strides towards war, ecological disaster, genocide and neo-fascist barbarism.

1.23. Facing this challenge, it is not enough to question the neoliberal regime and to revalue the role of the State. It would not even be enough to stop the dynamic of accumulation (an impossible goal under capitalism!) Global final energy consumption must diminish radically, which means produce less and transport less globally.

1.24. To respect this ecological-climatic constraint, the very orientation of the economy must change from top to bottom: science and the technological advances must be used to satisfy the social needs of the humankind and regenerate the global ecosystem, instead of satisfying the race for profit by capitalists. It is the only solution that makes it possible to reconcile the legitimate need of well-being for all, and the regeneration of the global ecosystem. Just sufficiency and just degrowth - ecosocialist degrowth - is a sine qua non condition of rescue.

1.25. Getting out of the productivist impasse is only possible under the following conditions:

1.25.1. • abandon the “technosolutionism”, that is the idea that the solution will come from new technologies (their impact on energy and resources is often underestimated, or not taken into account) In an ecologically wise way, decide to use the means we have, they suffice to meet the needs of all;

1.25.2. • drastically reduce the ecological footprint of the rich to permit a good life for all.

1.25.3. • put an end to the free market in capital (stock markets, private banks, pension funds);

1.25.4 • regulate markets for goods and services;

1.25.5 • maximize direct relationships between producers and consumers at all levels of society, and the processes of evaluating needs and resources from the perspective of use values and ecological and social priorities;

1.25.6. • determine democratically what needs these use values ​​must satisfy, and how;

1.25.7. • include at the centre of this democratic deliberation taking care of humans and ecosystems, careful respect for living things and for ecological boundaries,;

1.25.8. • consequently, suppress useless production and useless transport, rethink and reorganize all productive activity, its circulation and consumption.

1.26. These conditions are necessary but not sufficient. Social and ecological crises are one. We must rebuild an emancipatory project for the exploited and the oppressed. A class-based project which, beyond basic needs, favours being over having. A project that profoundly changes behaviour, consumption, the relationship with the rest of nature, the conception of happiness and the vision that humans have of the world. An anti-productivist project to live better by taking care of living things on the only habitable planet in the solar system.

1.27. Capitalism has plunged humanity into such a bleak situation before, especially on the eve of the first world conflict. Nationalist hysteria gripped the masses and social democracy, betraying its pledge to respond to war with revolution, gave the green light to the worst killings in human history. Nevertheless, Lenin defined the situation as “objectively revolutionary”: only revolution could stop the slaughter, he said. History proved him right: the revolution in Russia and its tendency to spread forced the bourgeoisies to put an end to the massacre. The comparison obviously has its limits. The mediations towards revolutionary action are infinitely more complex today. But the same awakening of consciousness is necessary. Yet in the face of the ecological crisis, an anti-capitalist revolution is even more objectively necessary. It is this fundamental judgement that must serve as a sub-base for the elaboration of a programme, a strategy and a tactic, because there is no other way to avoid catastrophe.

1.28. Everything depends on the outcomes of the struggles. No matter how deep the disaster, at every stage, the struggles will make the difference. Within the struggles, everything depends on the ability of ecosocialist activists to organize in order to orient themselves in practice on the compass of a historically necessary option.
2. The world we fight for

2.1. Our project for a future society articulates social and political emancipation with the imperative to stop the destruction of life and to repair as much as possible of the damage already done.

2.2. We want to (try to) imagine what a good life would be for everyone everywhere while reducing the consumption of matter and energy, and therefore reducing material production. It is not a question of giving a ready-made model, but of daring to think of another world, a world that makes us want to fight to build it by breaking with capitalism and productivism.

“Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.”

2.3. A good life for all requires that basic human needs - healthy food, health, shelter, clean air and water - are met.

2.4. A good life is also a chosen life, fulfilling and creative, engaged in rich and equal human relationships, surrounded by the beauty of the world and human achievements.

2.5. Our planet (still) has enough arable land, drinking water, sun and wind, biodiversity and resources of all kinds to meet legitimate human needs while renouncing climate-damaging fossil fuels and nuclear power. However, some of these resources are limited and therefore exhaustible, while others, although they are inexhaustible, require for their human consumption of materials that are exhaustible or even rare and whose extraction is ecologically damaging. In any case, as their use cannot be unlimited, we use them carefully and sparingly, in an ecologically wise way.

2.6. Essential to our lives they are excluded from private appropriation, considered as common goods because they must benefit humanity as a whole today and in the long term. In order to guarantee these common goods over time, collective rules defining the uses but also the limits of these uses, the obligations to take care of or repair, are drawn up.

2.7. Because a mangrove is not cared for in the same way as an icecap, a wetland in the same way as a sandy beach, a tropical forest in the same way as a river, because solar energy does not obey the same rules, does not impose the same material constraints as wind or water power, the elaboration of rules can only be the fruit of a democratic process involving those immediately concerned, workers and inhabitants.

2.8. Our common good is also all the services that allow us to respond in an egalitarian way, and therefore free of charge, to the needs of education, health, culture, access to water, energy, communication, transport, etc. They, too, are managed and organized democratically by the whole of society.

2.9. Services that deal with people and the care they need at the different stages of life break down the separation of public and private, all while respecting the intimacy of all, and end the assignment of women to these tasks by socializing them, i.e. by making them the business of the whole of society. These services for social reproduction are essential tools, among others, to fight patriarchal oppression.

2.10. All these decentralized, participatory, community-based “public services” form the basis of a non-authoritarian social organization.

2.11. On the scale of society as a whole, democratic ecological planning allows people to reappropriate the major social choices relating to production, to decide, as citizens and users, on what to produce and how to produce it, on the services that must be provided, but also on the acceptable limits for the use of material resources such as water, energy, transport, land, etc. These choices are prepared and enlightened by collective deliberation processes that rely on the appropriation of knowledge, whether scientific or derived from the experience of populations, on the self-organization of the oppressed (women’s liberation movements, racialized peoples, people with disabilities, etc.) to push back the barriers to development and to continue the conscious fight against discrimination and oppression.

2.12. This global economic and political democracy is articulated with multiple decentralized collectives/committees: those that allow decisions to be taken at the local level, in the city or neighbourhood, on the organization of public life and those that allow workers and producers to control the management and organization of their workplace, to decide on the way to produce and therefore to work. It is the combination of these different levels of democracy that allows cooperation and not competition, a management that is fair from an ecological and social point of view, fulfilling from a human point of view, at the level of the workplace, the company, the branch... but also of the neighbourhood, the city, the region, the country and even the planet!

2.13. All decisions on production and distribution, on how we want to live are guided by the principle: decentralize as much as possible, coordinate as much as necessary.

2.14. Taking charge of one’s life, and participating in social collectives, requires time, energy, and collective intelligence. Fortunately, the work of production and social reproduction only takes up a few hours a day.

2.15. Production is exclusively devoted to the satisfaction of democratically determined needs. Production and distribution are organized in such a way as to minimize the consumption of resources and to eliminate waste, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, it permanently aims at sobriety and “programmed sustainability” (as opposed to the programmed obsolescence of capitalism whether planned or simply due to the logic of the race for profit). Producing as close as possible to the needs to be met allows for a reduction in transport and a better understanding of the work, materials and energy required.

2.16. Thus, agriculture is ecological, small-scale and local in order to ensure food sovereignty and the protection of biodiversity. Processing workshops and distribution channels ensure that most of the food is produced in short circuits.

2.17. The energy sector based on renewable sources is as decentralized as possible to reduce losses and optimize sources. Activities related to social reproduction (health, education, care of the elderly or dependent persons, childcare, etc.) are developed and enhanced, taking care not to reproduce gender stereotypes.

2.18. Although work occupies less time, it occupies an essential place because, together with nature and by taking care of it, it produces what is necessary for life.

2.19. Self-management of production units combined with democratic planification allows workers to control their activity, to decide how to organize work and to question the division between manual and intellectual work. The deliberation extends to the choice of technologies according to whether or not they allow the work collective to control the production process. Giving pride of place to concrete, practical and real knowledge of the work process, to collective and individual know-how, and to creativity, makes it possible to design and produce robust objects that can be dismantled and repaired, that can be reused and, if necessary, recycled, and to reduce the consumption of materials and energy from manufacture to use.

2.20. In all areas, the conviction of doing something useful and the satisfaction of doing it well are combined. As for tedious tasks such as collecting rubbish, everyone pays attention to reducing the load and difficulty. However, there remains an essential part which is performed by everyone in turn.

2.21. A large part of material production, because the volume is greatly reduced, can be deindustrialized (all or part of clothing or food) and artisan skills, in which everyone could be trained, should be better valued.

2.22. Liberating labour from alienation allows us to abolish the boundary between art and life in a kind of “luxury communism”. We can keep or share tools, furniture, a bicycle, clothes... all our lives because they are ingeniously designed and beautiful.

Being rather than having

“Only that which is good for all is worthy of you. Only that is worthy of being produced which neither privileges nor demeans anyone.” (A. Gorz).

2.23. Freedom does not lie in unlimited consumption, but in chosen and understood self-limitation, defined against consumerist alienation. Collective deliberation makes it possible to deconstruct artificial needs, to define “universalizable” needs, i.e. not reserved for certain people or certain parts of the world, which must be satisfied.

2.24. True wealth does not lie in the infinite increase of goods – having – but in the increase of free time – being. Free time opens up the possibility of fulfilment in play, study, civic activity, artistic creation, interpersonal relationships and with the rest of nature.

2.25. So we are opening the way to a lot of activity because we have time to think about it and because we can do it with care for people and the rest of nature at the centre.

2.26. The places where we live, each space in which we socialize, belong to us for building other interpersonal social relationships. Freed from land speculation and the car, we can rethink the use of public spaces, bridge the separation between the centre and the periphery, multiply recreational, meeting and sharing spaces, de-artificializing cities with urban agriculture and community market gardening, restoring biotopes embedded in the urban fabric... And beyond that, implement a long-term policy aimed at rebalancing urban and rural populations and overcoming the opposition between town and country in order to reconstitute liveable, sustainable human communities on a scale that allows for real democracy.

2.27. Our desires and emotions are no longer things to be bought and sold, the range of choices is greatly enlarged for everyone, everyone can develop new ways of having sexual relationships, of living, working and raising children together, of building life projects in a free and diverse way, respecting each person’s personal decisions and humanity, with the idea that there is no one option possible, or one option better than the others. The family can stop being the space for the reproduction of domination, and stop being the only possible form of collective life. We can thus rethink the form of parenthood in a more collective way, politicize our personal decisions about motherhood and parenthood, reflect on how we consider childhood and the role of the elderly or disabled, the social relations we establish with them, and how we are able to break the logics of domination that we have internalized, inherited from previous societies.

2.28. We are building a new culture, the opposite of rape culture, a culture that recognizes the bodies of all cis and trans women, and their desires, that recognizes everyone as subjects capable of deciding about their bodies, their lives and their sexualities, that makes it visible that there are a thousand ways of being a person and of living and expressing our gender and sexuality.

2.29. Sexual activity that is freely consented to and enjoyable for all who take part in it is its own sufficient justification.

2.30. We must learn to think about the interdependence of living beings and develop a conception of the relationship between humanity and nature that will probably resemble in some respects that of indigenous peoples, but will nevertheless be different. A conception in which the ethical notions of precaution, respect and responsibility, as well as wonder at the beauty of the world, will constantly interact with a scientific understanding that is both ever more refined and ever more aware of its incompleteness.
3. Our transitional method

3.1. From our analysis of capitalism and specifically the policies of the ruling class in relation to ecological dangers and climate change, it follows:

3.2. First, that there is a need for an overall alternative and a social plan based on use-value production rather than exchange value. Turning this or that screw within the system and without changing the mode of production will not be able to avert or even significantly mitigate the current crises and the catastrophes we are facing and that will come due to the permanence of the capitalist system. One of the important tasks of revolutionary politics is to convey this insight.

3.3. The understanding of the need for global revolutionary change is a task that cannot be solved directly and without difficulty in practice. That is why, secondly, it is important to combine the presentation of the global perspective with putting forward immediate demands for which mobilizations can really be developed or promoted.

3.4. Thirdly, it must be emphasized: people cannot be convinced by argumentation alone. To win people over to turning away from the capitalist system and to encourage them to resist, successful struggles are needed that give courage and demonstrate that partial victories are possible.

3.5. And fourthly, successful struggles require better organization. This is always true in principle, but today – in times when the trade unions have (in many parts of the world) largely disappeared politically and the left is fragmented – it is important to promote practical cooperation in a non-sectarian way, especially among the anti-capitalist left, and at the same time to support workers in their self-organization.

3.6. On the one hand, time is pressing if we do not want to see crucial tipping points crossed and global warming accelerate beyond control. On the other hand, the vast majority of people are not ready to take up the fight for a different system, i.e. to overthrow capitalism. This is partly due to a lack of knowledge of the overall situation, but even more to a lack of perspective on what the alternative could or should look like. What is more, the social and political relationship of forces between the classes does not exactly encourage confrontation with the rulers and the profiteers of the capitalist social order.

3.7. On the other hand, a reform programme that wants to reform capitalism or overcome it piecemeal (moreover, directed from above) also has no chance of success. Reforms that accept the rules of the capitalist system are unable to confront the challenges of the ecological crisis. And gradual changes in the economy and state have never led to a change of system. The owners and profiteers of capitalism will not peacefully watch as their wealth is confiscated and their way for enrichment is deprived of its basis piece by piece.

3.8. Time is short, and there is the need for urgent measures. Some opponents of ecosocialism argue for mild reforms “because we cannot wait for world revolution”. Well, partisans of ecosocialism do not propose to wait! Our strategy is to begin NOW, with concrete transitional demands. It is the beginning of a process towards global change. These are not separate historical stages, but dialectical moments in the same process. Each partial or local victory is a step in this movement, which reinforces self-organization and encourages the fight for new victories.

3.9. In the upcoming class struggles – they are a base for the battle of hegemony involving in broader layers of the working class, the youth, the women, the indigenous etc. – it must become clear that ultimately there is no way around a real change of system and the question of power. The ruling class must be expropriated and its political power overthrown.
3.10. For an anticapitalist transitional programme

3.11. The transitional method was already suggested by Marx and Engels in the last section of the Communist Manifesto (1848). But it is the Fourth International that gave it its modern signification, in the Transitional Programme from 1938. Its basic assumption is the need for the revolutionaries to help the masses, in the process of the daily struggle, to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class; the aim is to lead social struggles towards the conquest of power by the proletariat.

3.12. Of course, revolutionaries do not discard the programme of the traditional old “minimal” demands: they obviously defend the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. However, they propose a system of transitional demands, which can be appropriately understood by the exploited and the oppressed, but at the same time is directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime.

3.13. Most of the transitional demands mentioned in the Programme of 1938 are still relevant today: sliding scale of wages and sliding scale of hours; worker’s control of the factories, opening of the business “secret” accounts; expropriation of private banks; expropriations of certain groups of capitalists; among others. The interest of such proposals is to unite in struggle the broadest possible popular masses, around concrete demands that are in objective contradiction with the rules of the capitalist system.

3.1.3. But we need to update our programme of transitional demands, in order to take into account the new conditions of the 21th Century, and in particular the new situation created by the ecological crisis and the imminent danger of catastrophic climate change. Today these demands must have a socio-ecological and, potentially, an ecosocialist nature.

3.14. The aim of the ecosocialist transitional demands is strategic: to be able to mobilize large sections of the urban and rural workers, women, youth, victims of racism or national oppression, as well as unions, social movements, and left parties in a struggle that challenges the capitalist system and bourgeois rule. These demands, which combine social and ecological interests, must be considered as necessary, legitimate and relevant by the exploited and the oppressed, according to their given level of social and political consciousness. In the struggle, people become conscious of the need to organize, to unite and to fight; they also begin to understand who is the enemy: not only local forces, but the system itself. The aim of the transitional eco-social demands is to enhance, thanks to the struggle, the social and political consciousness of the exploited and the oppressed, their anti-capitalist understanding, and, hopefully, an ecosocialist revolutionary perspective.

3.15. Some of these demands have a universal character: for instance, free public transportation. It is both an ecological and a social demand, and it contains seeds of the ecosocialist future: public services vs market, and gratuity vs capitalist profit. However, their strategic significance is not the same according to the societies and the economies. Ecosocialist transitional demands must take into account the needs and aspirations of the masses, according to their local expression, in the different parts of the world capitalist system.
4. Main lines of an ecosocialist alternative to capitalist growth

INTR.4.1. Satisfying real social needs while respecting ecological constraints is only possible by breaking with the productivist and consumerist logic of capitalism, which widens inequalities, harms the living and “ruins the only two sources of all wealth – the Earth and the workers” (Marx). Breaking this logic implies fighting in priority for the following lines of force. They form a coherent whole, to be completed and broken down according to national and regional specificities. Of course, in each continent, and in each country, there are specific measures to be proposed in a transitional perspective.
4.1. Against disasters, public prevention plans adapted to social needs, under popular control

4.1.1. Some effects of the climate catastrophe are irreversible (rising sea levels) or will last for a long time (heatwaves, droughts, exceptional precipitation, more violent tornadoes, etc.). Capitalist insurance companies do not protect the popular classes, or (at best) protect them poorly. Faced with these scourges, the wealthy have only the word “adaptation” on their lips. “Adaptation” to warming, for them, serves 1°) to divert attention from the structural causes, for which their system is responsible; 2°) to continue their harmful practices focused on maximum profit, without worrying about the long term; 3°) to offer new markets to capitalists (infrastructure, air conditioning, transport, carbon compensation, etc.). This technocratic and authoritarian capitalist “adaptation” is in fact what the IPCC calls “maladaptation.” It increases inequalities, discrimination and dispossession. It also increases vulnerability to rising temperatures, with the risk of seriously jeopardizing the very possibility of adaptation in the future, especially in poor countries. To capitalist “maladaptation”, we oppose the immediate demand for public prevention plans adapted to the situation of the popular classes. They are the main victims of extreme meteorological phenomena, especially in dominated countries. Public prevention plans must be designed according to their needs and their situation, through dialogue with scientists. They must encompass all sectors, in particular agriculture, forestry, housing, water management, energy, industry, labour legislation, health and education. They must be the subject of broad democratic consultation, with the right of veto of the local communities and work forces concerned.
4.2. Share the wealth to take care of humans and our living environment, free of charge

4.2.1. Quality health care, good education, good care for young children, a dignified retirement and a care system that respects dependency, accessible, permanent and comfortable housing, efficient public transport, renewable energy, healthy food, a clean water, internet access and a natural environment in good condition: these are the real needs that a civilization worthy of its name should sufficiently satisfy for all humans, regardless of their skin colour, gender, ethnicity, convictions. This is possible while significantly decreasing the global strain in our environment. Why have we not got this? Because the economy is tuned to induce consumption created as an industrial byproduct by capitalists. They consume and invest ever more for profit, appropriate all resources, and transform everything into commodities. Their selfish logic sows misfortune and death.

4.2.2. A 180° turn is required. Natural resources and knowledge constitute a common good to be managed prudently and collectively. The satisfaction of real needs and the revitalization of ecosystems must be planned democratically and supported by the public sector, under the active control of the popular classes, and by extending free access as much as possible. This collective project must harness scientific expertise to its service. The necessary first step is to fight inequalities and oppression. Social justice and a good life for all are ecological demands!
4.3. Expand commons and public services against privatization and marketization

4.3.1. This is one of the key aspects of a social and ecological transition, in many areas of life. For instance:

4.3.2. • Water: the present privatization, wasteful consumption and pollution of water – rivers, lakes and subterranean – is a social and ecological disaster. Water scarcity and floodings due to climate change are major threats for billion people. Water is a common good, and should be managed and distributed by public services, under the control of the consumers. Landscapes and cities should be made permeable to water and able to store water to avoid massive flooding.

4.3.3. • Housing: The basic right of all people to decent, permanent and ecologically sustainable housing cannot be guaranteed under capitalism. The law of profit entails evictions, demolitions and criminalization of those who resist. It also entails high energy bills for the poor and subsidized renewables for the rich. Public control of the real estate market, lowering and freezing of the interest and profits of the banks, a radical increase of good, public, social and cooperative housing, a public process of climate insulation of houses and a massive programme of building energetically autonomous houses, are first steps of an alternative politics.

4.3.4. • Health: the results of the COVID-19 pandemic are crystal clear: privatization and cuts in the care sector fragilize the popular classes - in particular children, women and the elderly - and are strong threats to public health in general. This sector must be refinanced massively and put integrally in the hands of the collectivity. Investments must go in priority to the front-line medicine. The pharma industry must be socialized.

4.3.5. • Transports: Individual transport in capitalism privileges private cars, with dire health and ecological consequences. The alternative is a large and efficient system of free public transportation, as well as a great extension of pedestrian and cyclable areas. Commodities are transported in great distances by trucks or container ships, with enormous gas emissions; reductions in wasteful consumption and relocalization of production and transports of goods by the train are immediate necessary measures. Air transport should be significantly reduced, and suppressed for distances than can be covered by train.
4.4. Take the money where it is: the capitalists and the rich must pay

4.4.1. A global transition strategy worthy of the name must articulate the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources, protection against the already perceptible effects of climate change, compensation for losses and prejudices, assistance for reconversion (in particular guaranteed income for the workers concerned) and the repair of ecosystems. Between now and 2050 this needs several trillion dollars. Who should pay? those responsible for the disaster: multinationals, banks, pension funds, imperialist states and the rich of the North and South. The eco-socialist alternative requires a broad programme of tax reform and radical reduction of inequalities to take the money where it is: progressive taxation, lifting of banking secrecy, land register of assets, taxation of assets, exceptional single tax at high rate on ls heritage, elimination of tax havens, abolition of tax privileges for companies and the rich, opening of company account books, capping of high incomes, abolition of public debts recognized as “illegitimate” (without compensation, except for small investors), compensation by rich countries for the cost of renouncing the exploitation of their fossil resources by dominated countries (Yasuni park project).
4.5. No emancipation without anti-racist struggle

4.5.1. Racial oppression is a structural and structuring part of the capitalist mode of production and was an element that guaranteed the primitive accumulation of capital, made possible by colonization and the trafficking of enslaved black people.

4.5.2. Building a new world free of all oppression and exploitation requires us to oppose racism head-on, as a central task of the ecosocialist strategy. We must recognize that racism shapes social relations and fulfils the task of deepening and complexifying the mechanisms of bourgeois exploitation and wealth accumulation. Diversity that deviates from the standards of whiteness is transmuted into oppression.

4.5.3. The forced diaspora of millions of Africans, their commercialization in the Americas and the exploitation of their labour ensured European enrichment and even today guarantees their privileges. We need to break with the genocidal logic against non-white groups and seek to strengthen the anti-prison struggle against mass incarceration, especially through the neoliberal tactic of the farcical war on drugs, a justification for genocidal policies against socially racialized populations.

4.5.4. The fight against the militarization of the police must be at the heart of an anti-racist struggle, as must access to decent living conditions in general.

4.5.5. Racism manifests itself centrally as a mechanism of oppression of sectors of the working class right up to the present day, configuring a specific design of positions and accesses socially determined for whiteness, i.e. the supposed universal subject, and for people perceived as racialized.

4.5.6. It is necessary to confront all fiscal austerity policies, which deepen the precariousness of life for the working class as a whole and fall mostly and more heavily on non-white people. They structure environmental racism which, in this climate emergency, distributes the deadly consequences of capitalist production unevenly.
4.6. Freedom of movement and residence on Earth! Nobody is illegal!

4.6.1. The ecological catastrophe is a growing driving force for migration. An annual average of 21.5 million people were forcibly displaced by weather-related events between 2008 and 2016. Most of them are poor people coming from poor countries. Climate migration is expected to surge in coming decades: 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050. Unlike asylum-seekers, “climate refugees” do not even have any status. They bear no responsibility for the ecological catastrophe but that which is really responsible, the capitalist system, condemns them to swell the ranks of the 108.4 million people worldwide who were forcibly displaced in 2020 as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations. The basic rights of these people are under constant attack: the right to be protected against violence; to have enough water and food; to live in a safe house; to keep their family united; to find a decent job. A growing number of them (10 million) are even considered stateless by the UNHDR. All this is contrary to the most basic justice. It feeds the fascists who scapegoat the migrants and dehumanize them. This is a huge threat for the democratic and social rights of all. As internationalists, we fight for restrictive policies against Capital, not against the migrants. We oppose the building of walls, the confinement in centres, the building of camps, expulsions, deportations, and the racist rhetoric. Nobody is illegal on Earth, everybody must have the right to move and to leave everywhere. The borders must be open to all those who flee their country, whether it is for social, political, economic or environmental reason.
4.7. Eliminate unnecessary or harmful economic activities

4.7.1. Stopping the climate catastrophe and the decline of biodiversity necessarily requires a very rapid and significant reduction in final energy consumption at the global level. This constraint is unavoidable. First steps include drastically reducing the purchasing power of the rich, abandoning fast fashion, advertisement and luxury production/consumption (cruises, yachts and private jets or helicopters, space tourism, etc.), scaling down mass-produced meat and dairy and ending the accelerated obsolescence of products, extending their lifespan and facilitating their repair. Air and maritime transportation of goods should be reduced drastically by relocation of production, and replaced by train transportation whenever it is possible. More structurally, the energy constraint can only be respected by reducing as quickly as possible the economic activities that are useless or harmful. The main productive sectors to consider are: arms production, fossil energy and petrochemicals, extractive industry, non-sustainable manufacturing, wood and pulp industry, personal car construction, planes and shipbuilding.
4.8. Food sovereignty! Get out of agribusiness, industrial fishing and the meat industry

4.8.1. These three sectors pose serious threats to the climate, human health and biodiversity. Dismantling them requires measures at the level of production but also significant changes at the level of consumption (in developed countries and among the rich in all countries) and of the relationship with living things. Proactive policies are needed to stop deforestation and replace agribusiness, industrial tree plantations and large-scale fishing with small farmer agroecology, ecoforestry and small-scale fishing respectively. These alternatives consume less energy, employ more labour and are much more respectful of biodiversity. Farmers and fisherfolk must be properly compensated by the community, not only for their contribution to human food but also for their ecological contribution. The rights of the first peoples over the forest and other ecosystems must be protected. Global meat consumption must be reduced drastically. The meat and dairy industry must be dismantled and a diet based mainly on local vegetable production must be promoted. By doing that, we put an end to the abject treatment of animals in the meat industry and industrial fishing. Food sovereignty, in line with the proposals of Via Campesina, is a key objective. It requires a radical agrarian reform: the land to those who work it, especially women. Expropriation of big landowners and capitalist agribusiness who produce goods for the world market. Distribution of land to peasants and landless peasants (families or cooperatives) for agro-biological production. Abolition of the old and the new GMO crops in open field and elimination of toxic pesticides (starting with those whose use the imperialist countries prohibit but whose export they authorize in the dominated countries!).
4.9. Popular urban reform

4.9.1. More than half the world’s population now lives in increasingly larger cities. At the same time, rural regions are becoming depopulated, ruined by agribusiness and mining, and increasingly deprived of essential services. Dominated countries have some of the largest megacities on the planet (Jakarta, Manila, Mexico DF, New Delhi, Bombay, Sao Paulo, and others), a growing number of homeless people and slums where millions of human beings (around Karachi, Nairobi, Baghdad…) survive and work informally in undignified conditions. It is one of the most hideous wounds left by capitalist development and imperialist domination. In addition to violence, heat waves make survival increasingly difficult in slums and poor neighbourhoods, especially in humid climates. The ecosocialist alternative demands the launch of a vast social housing construction programme accompanied by a popular urban reform that changes the organization of large cities, designed in cooperation with homeless associations. This has to be combined on the one hand with labour legislation that protects workers, and on the other an attractiveness of agrarian reform, in order to initiate a movement of rural counter-emigration.
4.10 Socialize energy and finance without compensation or buyback to get out of fossil fuels and nuclear power as quickly as possible

4.10.1. The energy multinationals and the banks that finance them want to exploit every last ton of coal, every last litre of oil, every last cubic meter of gas. They initially hid and denied the impact of CO2 on climate change. Now, in order to continue to exploit these resources despite everything, and while soaring prices ensure them gigantic surplus profits, they promise all kinds of phony techniques (greenwashing, exchange of “polluting rights”, “emissions offsetting”, “Carbon capture, sequestration and utilization”) and promote nuclear energy as “low carbon”. No doubt is possible: these profit-hungry groups are taking the planet from climate catastrophe to cataclysm. At the same time, they are at the forefront of capitalist attacks on the working classes. They must be socialized by expropriation, without compensation or buyback. To stop the social and ecological destruction, to determine our future collectively, nothing is more urgent than constituting public services of energy and credit, decentralized and interconnected, under the democratic control of the populations.
4.11. For liberation and the self-determination of peoples; against war, imperialism and colonialism

4.11.1. We defend an internationalist programme based on social justice, for an ecosocialist transition led by liberating and collective forces, and for peace among peoples, confronting oppressive policies. We oppose NATO and other military alliances, which drive the world towards new inter-imperialist conflicts, we fight against increases in military budgets, for the dismantling of manufacturing and stocks of all nuclear, chemical and bacteriological armament and cyber weapons, for dismantling of all private military companies. Weapons must not be commodities; their use must be under political control for the purposes of defence and protection against aggression.

4.11.2. The sole road to peace is through the victorious struggles for the right to self-determination, the end of occupation of lands and ethnical cleansing. As internationalists, we are in solidarity with the oppressed people fighting for their rights, notably in Palestine and in Ukraine.
4.12. Guarantee employment for all, ensure the necessary retraining in ecologically sustainable and socially useful activities

4.12.1. Workers engaged in wasteful and harmful fossil fuel activities, in agribusiness, big fishing and the meat industry should not pay the price of capitalist management. A green job guarantee must be instituted to ensure their collective retraining, without loss of income, in the activities of the public plan to meet real needs and restore ecosystems. This green jobs guarantee will overcome the legitimate fears of the workers concerned. Thus, there will be an end to the cynical instrumentalization of these fears by the capitalists, in the service of their productivist/consumerist interests. On the contrary, the green job guarantee will encourage and motivate workers in condemned sectors to train and mobilize to actively take charge of carrying out the plan, in dialogue with the public benefiting from it, by investing their knowledge, their skills and their experience in an activity rich in meaning, emancipatory, truly human because concerned with the lives of future generations.
4.13. Work less, live and work better, live a good life

4.13.1. Radically reducing final energy consumption by eliminating useless and harmful production/consumption logically has the effect of radically reducing the time of salaried social work. This reduction must be collective. Capitalist waste is of such magnitude that its suppression will undoubtedly open up the concrete possibility of a very significant reduction in weekly working time (towards a half-day’s work) and a significant lowering of the retirement age. This trend towards reduction will be partly offset by the necessary reduction in work rhythms as well as by the increase in the social and ecological reproduction work necessary to take care of people (including by socializing part of the domestic work carried out for free mainly by women) and ecosystems. Democratic planning will be essential for the articulation over time of these movements in various directions. The ecosocialist break with capitalist growth implies a double transformation of work. Quantitatively, we will work much less. Qualitatively, it will create the conditions for making work an activity of the good life - a conscious mediation between humans (therefore also between men and women), and between humans and the rest of nature. This deep transformation of work and life will more than compensate for the changes in consumption affecting the best paid layers of the working class, mainly in the developed countries.
4.14. Guarantee the right of women over their own bodies

4.14.1. Humanity will not be able to consciously manage its relationship to the rest of nature without consciously managing its relationship to itself, that is to say its own biological reproduction, which passes through the body of women. It is not by chance that patriarchal attacks on women’s rights are intensifying everywhere: these attacks are an integral part of political projects that seek to establish strong powers at the service of the rich and the capitalists. They are most often carried out in the name of a reactionary “pro-life” ideology, which incidentally denies anthropogenic climate change. But, alongside these reactionary forces, there are also technocratic currents that blame the ecological crisis on “overpopulation” and thereby attempt to impose authoritarian policies of birth control. Faced with these two types of threats, we maintain that no morality, no higher reason, even ecological, can be invoked to deny women their elementary right to control their own fertility. The denial of this right is consubstantial with all other mechanisms of domination, including “human domination” over the rest of nature, for the benefit of patriarchy and its current capitalist form. Human emancipation includes the emancipation of women. This implies in priority that women must have free access to contraception, abortion, education on how to use them, and reproductive care in general.
4.15. Knowledge is a common good. Reform of the education and research systems

4.15.1. Knowledge is a common good of humankind. The implementation of the ecosocialist emergency programme has a crying need for decolonized and decapitalized knowledge, embodied by numerous and competent teachers and researchers in all disciplines. Reform of the education system, expansion of public schools and universities, end to discrimination in education, of which girls are particularly victims in certain countries. Recognition and integration of indigenous knowledge and know-how. Deep reform of research in order to put an end to its submission to capital. Direct research primarily towards repairing ecosystems and meeting the needs of the working classes, determined in consultation with them.
4.16. Hands off democratic rights! Popular control and self-organization of struggles

4.16.1. Powerless to curb the ecological catastrophe it has created, the ruling class is toughening its regime, criminalizing resistance and designating scapegoats. Its policies pave the way for nihilistic, nationalist, racist and macho neo-fascism. Faced with the bourgeoisie removing its mask, ecosocialism raises the flag of the extension of rights and freedoms: right of association, of demonstration, right to strike; free election of parliamentary bodies in a multi-party system, ban on private financing of political parties, legalization of popular initiative referendums, abolition of non-democratic institutions (Autonomous Central Bank); prohibition of private ownership of major means of communication, abolition of censorship; fight against corruption, dissolution of militias serving leaders, respect for the rights and territories of indigenous communities and other oppressed peoples, etc. Ecosocialism is a societal alternative that requires the broadest democracy. It is being prepared now through the democratic self-organization of popular struggles and the demand, at all levels, for transparency and popular control, with the right of veto.
4.17. Foster a cultural revolution based on careful respect for the living and “love for Mother Earth”

4.17.1. A radical break with the ideology of human domination of nature is essential to the development of both an ecological and a feminist (ecofeminist) culture of “caring” for people and the environment. The defence of biodiversity, in particular, cannot be based solely on reason (the human interest properly understood): it requires just as much empathy, respect, prudence and the kind of global conception that the first peoples sum up by the phrase “love of Mother Earth”. Maintaining this global conception or reacquiring it – through struggles, artistic creation, education and production/consumption alternatives, in particular – is a major ideological challenge in the ecosocialist struggle. Western modernity has systematized the idea that human beings are divine creatures whose mission is to dominate nature and instrumentalize other animals, reduced to the rank of machines. This non-materialist conception, intimately linked to colonial and patriarchal dominations, is completely disqualified today by scientific knowledge. We are part of the living Earth, we are also animals and human life would be impossible in absence of plants, of other animals, of the network of life on this planet.
4.18. Self-managed ecosocialist planning

4.18.1. The ecosocialist transition needs planning. In particular, the transformation of the energy system (exit from nuclear and fossil fuels, energy savings and development of renewables) needs to be planned. Contrary to what is often claimed, planning is not contradictory with democracy and self-management. The disastrous example of the countries of so-called “really existing socialism” simply shows that self-management is incompatible with authoritarian, bureaucratic planning, imposed from above in contempt of all democracy. What does democratic ecosocialist planning mean? Concretely, that the whole of society will be free to democratically choose the priorities for production and the level of resources which must be invested in education, health or culture. Far from being “despotic” in itself, democratic ecosocialist planning is the exercise of the freedom of decision of the whole of society, at all levels, from local to national global. A necessary exercise to free oneself from “economic laws” and “iron cages” that are alienating and reified within capitalist and bureaucratic structures. Democratic planning associated with the reduction of working time would be a considerable progress of humanity towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom”: the increase in free time is in fact a condition for the participation of workers in the democratic discussion and self-management of the economy and society. Ecosocialist democratic planning is about key economic choices and not about local restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, small stores, craft businesses. Likewise, it is important to emphasize that ecosocialist planning is not in contradiction with the self-management of workers in their production units. Self-management therefore means democratic control of the plan at all levels - local, regional, national, continental and planetary since ecological issues such as climate change are global and can only be addressed at that level. Ecosocialist democratic planning is opposed to what is often described as “central planning” because decisions are not taken by a “centre” but determined democratically by the populations concerned, according to the principle of subsidiarity: responsibility for public action, when necessary, must be allocated to the smallest entity capable of solving the problem itself.
5. Global degrowth in the context of uneven and combined development

5.1. There will be no national solution, a just ecosocialist alternative can begin in one country but its full implementation requires the abolition of capitalism at the global level. From now on, the exploited and the oppressed need therefore a consistent anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and internationalist strategy, aiming at a global outcome. This strategy must articulate the struggles that unfold in very different contexts. This means the main lines of an ecosocialist programme breaking with capitalist growth have general relevance but apply differently in different countries. Some demands are more important in some countries than others, according to their place in the uneven and combined development of capitalism under imperialist rule.

5.2. After centuries of slavery and colonial plunder, the populations of so-called “developing” countries are victims of a new monstrous injustice. While their responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions is small, almost nil in the poorest countries, the climatic shift caused by two hundred years of imperialist capitalist growth places them in the front line of catastrophes that are hitting them harder and harder.

5.3. Africa, Latin America, South and South-East Asia and the Pacific are home to the vast majority of the 3.5 billion women, men and children whose living conditions, even existence itself, are already cruelly affected by the consequences of global warming. The urgency is here and growing very quickly. The more temperatures rise, the less societies can protect themselves from the effects of global warming. Droughts, floods, typhoons, deadly heat waves and damage to ecosystems increasingly threaten the survival of millions of human beings, their ability to work and their basic rights in the short and medium term.

5.4. A majority on the planet, the populations of the dominated countries have the basic right to access to dignified living conditions. Imperialist governments, international institutions and the governments of the peripheral countries themselves claim that capitalist growth will enable people in the South to “catch up” with the standard of living of the developed capitalist countries. All it takes is “good governance” to “adjust” societies to the needs of the global market. This is a dead end, as shown by the fact that the inequalities continue to grow (between countries and, more and more, within countries), while the “carbon budget” compatible with 1.5°C is vanishing rapidly.

5.5. In reality, the imperialist model of development keeps the dominated countries in a neocolonial position of subordination, as suppliers of raw materials and low-cost labour power, producers of plant and animal goods for export, places for storing waste - among others carbon sinks appropriated by capitalists for their profit - and main victims of the ecological crisis. Added to this are now the scandalous policies of developed countries which pay dominated countries to play the role of border police. The local corrupt “elites” carry a major responsibility. Instead of promoting an alternative development, based on alternative social values, they have come to serve imperialism.

5.6. The discourse of the “catching up with the North by the South” is only a chimera, a smokescreen to conceal the continuation of capitalist and imperialist exploitation, which widens inequalities. With the rise of ecological disasters, this discourse is objectively losing all credibility.

5.7. The multipolar world of the BRICS is not an alternative to imperialism, as shown by the politics of Russia and China, the two main leaders of this geostrategic alliance. Their autocratic leaders do not oppose the imperialist and oppressive practices of “classic” Western imperialism – they want to have the same rights. Likewise, what they object to is not the gap between rights and the realities in the practices of Western societies, it is the rights themselves (of workers, women, LGBTQ+, etc.) Putin wants to rebuild a colonial empire by force and coercion. Taking advantage of the huge fossil fuels reserves he seeks alliances with oil monarchies, other dictatorships and powerful interests in the energy and crime industry to prolong the exploitation of fossil fuels as long as possible. The Chinese Communist party claims to show the countries of the South that they can escape domination and develop by entering the New Silk Roads, but its project of global capitalist hegemony is one of the main drivers of ecological destruction and accumulation by dispossession.

5.8. Now is not the time for “catching up” but for planetary sharing. The great mass of the working people, of women, of youth, of the ethnic minorities, in the “North” and in the dominated countries are victims of climate change. According to scientific analysis of the climate policies, the richest 1% will emit even more CO2 by 2030, the poor 50% will emit a little bit more but remain largely under the level of individual emissions compatible with 1.5°C, the intermediate 40% will support the greatest part of the emissions reduction (with the proportionally greatest effort imposed on low incomes in rich countries). This is the basis for an international struggle for justice and equality. The meagre carbon budget still available must and can be shared according to historical responsibilities and capacities, not only between countries but more and more between social classes. Mineral resources and the wealth of biodiversity must be harvested carefully, according to the real needs of all.

5.9. The capitalists of the imperialist countries are by far the main responsible for the ecological crisis and must pay the consequences. The bill must be paid, too, by countries like the “oil monarchies”, Russia, and China, although their historical responsibility is not the same. The industrialized countries of the “North” – Europe, North America, Australia, Japan – must make the greatest efforts in terms of a rapid degrowth in useless and/or harmful productions. They are also responsible for giving the dominated countries access to alternative technologies, as well as to provide funding for an ecological transition and real reparation for the loss and damage. The abolition of patents must allow the peoples of the South to freely access technologies that can meet real needs without using even more fossil energy.

5.10. A dollar spent serving the needs of the richest 1% generates thirty times more CO2 emissions than a dollar invested in meeting the social needs of the poorest 50% of the world’s population. Numerous scientific studies show that the satisfaction of the basic needs of the popular classes both in the dominated countries and in the so-called “developed” countries would only have a modest carbon footprint. The radical reduction of the carbon footprint of the richest 1% - in the North and in the South! - and sufficiency for all would broadly compensate for it.

5.11. To satisfy their needs, the people in dominated countries need a development model radically opposed to the imperialist and productivist model. A model that prioritizes public services (health, education, housing, transport, sewage, electricity, drinking water) for the mass of the population, and not the production of goods for the world market. An anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist model, which expropriates the monopolies in the sectors of finance, mining, energy, agribusiness, and socializes them under democratic control.

5.12. In the poorer countries, the necessity to meet the needs of the population will require increased material production and energy consumption over a period of time. Within the framework of the alternative development model and other international exchanges, the contribution of these countries to global ecosocialist degrowth and respect for ecological balances will consist of:imposing just reparation on imperialist countries;
cancelling the conspicuous consumption of the parasitical elite;
fighting ecocidal megaprojects inspired by neoliberal capitalist policies, such as giant pipelines, pharaonic mining projects, new airports, offshore oil wells, large hydroelectric dams and immense tourist infrastructures appropriating natural and cultural heritage for the benefit of rich;
Ecological agrarian reform to substitute industrialized agro-business.
refusing the destruction of biomes by breeders, palm oil planters, agribusiness in general and the mining industry, “forest compensation” (REDD and REDD+ projects) as well as “fishing agreements” which offer fishery resources to industrial fishing multinationals, etc.

Through their struggles, the popular classes of the dominated countries can contribute in a decisive way to engage the exploited of the whole world in this path, the only one compatible both with human rights and with terrestrial limits.
6. Against the tide, make the struggles converge to break with capitalist productivism. Seize the government, initiate the ecosocialist rupture based on self-activity, self-organization, control from below, the broadest democracy

6.1. The economy, the state, the politics of the bourgeoisie and its international relations are deeply affected by the eco-social impasse in which capitalist accumulation and imperialist plunder have plunged humanity. Around the world, the exploited and the oppressed are gripped by deep anguish.

6.2. Movements of resistance are developing against the tide. Even in extremely difficult contexts, people stand up for their social, democratic, anti-imperialist, ecological, feminist, LGBTQI, anti-racist, indigenous, peasant rights. Some remarkable victories have been won: victory of the Indian peasants against the Modi government, victory of the “zadists” in France against the airport of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, victory of women in the fight for abortion in Argentina, victory of the Sioux in the US against the XXL pipeline… But the enemy is on the offensive and a lot of struggles are defeated. Our task, as activists of the Fourth International, is to help organize and extend the struggles, bringing our ecosocialist and internationalist perspective to bear.

6.3. The productivism of the hegemonic forces of the left, parties and trade unions, is a serious obstacle on the road to an ecosocialist response commensurate with the objective situation. Most of the leaderships have abandoned any anti-capitalist perspective. Social-democracy and all other variants of reformism have become social-liberal, their only ambition is to bring some social corrections to the market within the limits of the neoliberal framework. Most leaderships of the big trade union organizations limit themselves to accompanying neoliberal policies with the illusion that capitalist growth will improve employment, wages and social protection. Instead of organizing an awareness of the ecosocial impasse, these policies of class collaboration deepen it and conceal its gravity.

6.4. Fortunately, some political forces and trade union currents – notably in Europe, the US, and Latin America – are beginning to distance themselves from productivism and neoliberalism. In the trade unions, activists aware of the ecological challenge have advanced the concept of a “just transition”. Social democracy and ITUC trade union leaders have hijacked it in the direction of supporting productivism and business competitiveness. The dominant class is expert in manipulation. This is how “just transition” has joined “sustainable development” in the discourses of governments that trample on justice and organize unsustainability.

6.5. In the “developed” capitalist countries, the ranks of the traditional forces have been reinforced by the green parties. It took four decades for the vast majority of these parties to join the layer of the political managers of capitalism. Their pragmatism based on the individual responsibility of consumers is extended in civil society by numerous environmental associations. It has allowed social democracy and traditional labour leaderships to disguise their class collaboration in defence of the “lesser social evil” in the face of ecotaxes and other so-called “realistic” solutions of “neither left nor right” ecology.

6.6. In other parts of the world, although still a minority, ecosocialism is beginning to gain an influence on social movements and the radical left. Some important local experiences - in Mindanao, Rojava, and Chiapas, among others - have affinities with the ecosocialist perspective. However, capitalist growth still falsely appears to most as the only way to improve social conditions.

6.7. Given the depth of the crisis and disarray, there is a real risk of seeing a growing tendency in sectors of the working classes to sacrifice ecological objectives on the altar of development, job creation and increased income. This trend would only accelerate the catastrophe of which these same classes are already the first victims and would deepen the loss of legitimacy of the unions. It would also create fertile ground for neo-fascist attempts to greenwash racist, colonialist and genocidal projects. The migrants fleeing their devastated lands are the main targets of these hate campaigns.

6.8. The socialist project is deeply discredited by the records of Stalinism and social democracy. It is from struggles that we must reinvent an alternative, not from dogmas.

6.9. Who is today on the front lines of the real movement? Indigenous peoples, youth, peasants, racialized people who pay a heavy price for the social and ecological destruction. In these four groups, women play a decisive role, in connection with their specific, ecofeminist demands, for which they fight and organize themselves autonomously.

6.10. The international peasant alliance Via Campesina demonstrates that it is possible to combine the defence of the rights of poor peasants and indigenous peoples, the fight against extractivism and agro-industry, the fight for food sovereignty and the preservation of ecosystems with feminism.

6.11. The vast majority of wage-workers is absent or standing back from anti-productivist struggles. Some then infer that the class struggle is outdated, or must be waged by an “ecological class” that exists only in their imagination. But stopping the catastrophe is only possible by revolutionizing the mode of production of social existence. How would this revolution in the mode of production of social existence be possible without the active and conscious participation of producers? Furthermore, they are the majority….

6.12. Others, on the contrary, deduce that it is necessary to wait for the moment when the mass of workers in struggle for their immediate socio-economic demands will have reached the level of consciousness allowing them to participate in the ecological struggle on a “class line”. However, how would the level of consciousness of the mass of employees integrate ecological issues in time if no major social struggle comes to shake up the productivist framework within which the mass of employees, increasingly on the defensive, spontaneously raises its immediate socio-economic demands? Moving beyond the productivist framework requires a logic of public initiative and planning of the necessary reconversions, with guaranteed employment and income.

6.13. The class struggle is not a cold abstraction. “The real movement that abolishes the current state of things” (Marx) defines it and designates its actors. The struggles of women, LGBTQI people, oppressed peoples, racialized peoples, migrants, peasants and indigenous peoples for their rights are not placed adjacent to the struggles of workers against the exploitation of labour by the bosses. They are part of the living class struggle.

6.14. They are part of it because capitalism needs the patriarchal oppression of women to maximize surplus value and ensure social reproduction at a lower cost; needs the discrimination of LGBTQI people to validate patriarchy; needs structural racism to justify the looting of the periphery by the centre; needs inhuman “asylum policies” to regulate the industrial reserve army; needs to submit the peasantry to the dictates of junk food-producing agribusiness to compress the price of labour power; and needs to eliminate the respectful relationship that human communities still maintain within themselves and with nature, to replace it with its individualistic ideology of domination, which transforms the collective into an automaton and the living into dead things.

6.15. All these struggles and those of workers against capitalist exploitation are part of the same fight for human emancipation, and this emancipation is only really possible and worthy of humanity in the awareness of the fact that our species belongs to nature while having, because of its specific intelligence, the responsibility, now unavoidable and vital, of taking careful care of it. Such is for us, indeed, the strategic implication arising from the fact that the destructive force of capitalism has ushered the planet into a new geological era.

6.16. This analysis is the basis of our strategy of convergence of social and ecological struggles.

6.17. This convergence of struggles should not limit itself to the search, between social movements, or between apparatuses of social movements, for the greatest common denominator in terms of demands. This conception can imply the disregard of certain demands of certain groups - to the detriment of the weakest among them - that is to say... the opposite of convergence.

6.18. The convergence of social and ecological struggles includes all the struggles of all social actors, from the most seasoned to the most hesitant. It is a process of dynamic articulation, which raises the level of consciousness through action and debate, in mutual respect. Its goal is not the determination of a fixed platform but the constitution of the combat unity of the exploited and the oppressed around concrete demands opening a dynamic aiming at the conquest of political power and the overthrow of capitalism in the whole world.

6.19. In practice, the ecosocial convergence of struggles implies above all, today, that the sectors most aware of ecological threats address themselves to the sectors most aware of social threats, and vice versa, in order to overcome together the false capitalist opposition between the social and ecological.

6.20. In this approach, the defence of an eco-unionism that is both class struggle and anti-productivist plays an essential role, based on the concrete concerns of workers for the preservation of their health and safety at work and on the role of warning about the damage to ecosystems and the danger of production that they are best placed to play.

6.21. As ecosocialist activists, we encourage resistance in the workplace through strikes and all initiatives that promote the organization and control of workers. We work to strengthen mobilizations by combining the extension of strikes, the massification of demonstrations, by promoting all forms of self-organization and self-protection of the struggle against repression, as well as its popularization to counter the lies of the dominant media and the government apparatus.

6.22. We are also inspired by forms of civil disobedience, from blocking sites to boycotting rent payments, which have also proven their effectiveness.

6.23. Experiences from struggles help to feed the strategic debate.

6.24. Anti-productivist struggles are diverse, but generally their starting point is very concrete, often local, in opposition to a new transport infrastructure (motorway, airport, etc.), commercial or logistical infrastructure, extractivist infrastructure (mines, pipelines, mega-dams, etc.), the grabbing of land or water, the destruction of a forest or a river, etc. It is firstly the threat to daily life, to livelihoods and health that mobilizes people, not generalizing discourse. By confronting political decision-makers, capitalist groups and the institutions that protect them, by forging alliances between actors with different histories and commitments, the struggle becomes more and more global and political.

6.25. These combinations of struggles anchored in a specific territory with a precise objective and general combat exist throughout the world and form a new political reality called “Blockadia”.

6.26. In France, against the airport project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the convergence of farmers, young radical activists and local residents won the support of the people and trade unionists, including those of the concession holder, and led to victory. Inspired by this winning strategy, of the Soulèvement de la Terre movement was able, through organizing the struggle against megabasins (huge water reservoirs for the irrigation of industrial crops), to raise the question of water as a common good to be preserved against its monopolization by agribusiness.

6.27. In the United States, against the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens to pollute the Missouri and the Mississippi and crosses the sacred lands of the Sioux natives, the latter have established a camp at Standing Rock, joined by thousands of people, young people, environmentalists... The camp resisted fierce repression and forced an investigation into the dangers of the DAPL to the environment. The legal and political battle continues.

6.28. The formation of an ecosocialist class consciousness implies a convergence in the struggles in which (young) scientists can contribute by using and sharing their knowledge (agronomic, climatic, naturalist...).

6.29. Strike committees, community health centres, company takeovers, land occupations, self-managed living spaces, repair workshops, canteens, seed libraries, etc., allow the experimentation of a social organization free of capitalism. They allow those who are deprived of political and economic power to experience their collective power and intelligence. Contradicting the illusions about a possible bypass or adjustment of the system, they sooner or later come up against the state and the capitalist market, showing that it is impossible to do without political power and the necessary overthrow of the system. However, by establishing, even temporarily, another legitimacy that is popular, democratic and based on solidarity, the concrete alternatives allow the dominated to become aware of their own strengths and to work towards the construction of a new hegemony.

6.30. More globally, the construction of self-organized organs of popular power is at the heart of our strategy.

6.31. The systemic crisis of “late capitalism” dominated by transnational finance nurtures both a disgust in the face of the phenomena of the decay of the bourgeois regime and a feeling of helplessness in the face of the profound deterioration, both quantitative and qualitative, of the balance of power between classes. In this context, the question of government takes on increased importance. Seizing political power is a prerequisite for the implementation of a plan initiating a policy of rupture, but recent years have shown the deadly illusions of political projects which exploit popular aspirations, channel mobilizations, even stifle them in the name of realpolitik, and thus strengthen the far right.

6.32. There is no shortcut. An ecosocialist strategy of rupture involves the struggle for the formation of a government on the basis of a transitional plan and the systematic promotion of self-activity, control and direct intervention by the exploited and oppressed at all levels because no consistent measure against exploitation, oppression and the destruction of ecosystems will be imposed without a balance of power based on this self-organization. Consequently, self-emancipation is not only our goal, but also a strategy for overthrowing the established order. New institutions must be built to deliberate, to decide democratically, to organize production and the whole of society... These new powers will have to confront the capitalist state machine, which must be broken. The overthrow of the social order, the expropriation of the capitalists, will inevitably come up against the violent, armed response of the ruling classes. Faced with this violence, the exploited and the oppressed will have no choice but to defend themselves, it will be a question of democratically self-organizing legitimate violence while refusing virilism and substitutism.

6.33. Reflecting and acting, building struggles and tools of struggle, comparing experiences and learning from them: the international implementation of this immense task requires a political tool, a new International of the exploited and oppressed. Through this Manifesto, the Fourth International expresses its readiness to help meet this challenge.1In this document we use the term “Global South” to describe dependent countries, dominated countries, peripheral countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. We use all these expressions to refer to the same reality. We do not include in the Global South countries like China, Russia, the Oil Monarchies, etc which occupy a specific place in the world capitalist system of domination, and cannot be considered as “dominated”.
2Terawatt-hour (1 TWh = 1 billion kWh). This energy unit is used to measure the electricity production of a power plant (a few TWh) or a national production. A kilowatt hour is equivalent to a steady power of one kilowatt running for one hour and is equivalent to 3.6 million joules or 3.6 megajoules.
3This rebound effect is also known as “Jevons paradox”

From the genocide in Palestine and Ukraine to the fascist threat: Working toward a revolutionary, Marxist-Humanist response

Peter Hudis
Kevin B. Anderson
Heather Brown
Lyndon Porter
Fernando Baleia
16 May, 2024


First published at The International Marxist-Humanist.

Part I: Does Today’s Objective Situation Represent the Midnight of the Twenty-First Century?

Today’s global capitalism is sinking into unimaginable levels of barbarism. It is exemplified by Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine; Russia’s escalating attacks on Ukraine; the violent suppression of mass movements in Peru, Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, and China; and in the growing threat posed by the neo-fascist far-Right in India, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Argentina, and the U.S., where the re-election of Donald Trump in November looms as a real possibility.

Nowhere is this barbarism more glaring than in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its intensifying attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. The 32,500 officially recorded killed in Gaza as of this writing is horrendous enough; but the dehumanization visited upon Palestinians extends even further. Almost 20,000 (mainly women and children) are missing and presumably buried under rubble, while well over a million-and-a-half are facing outright starvation and disease. The devastating impact of Israel dropping 30,000 air-to-ground munitions (not counting artillery shells and demolitions by its ground troops) on an area not much larger than Manhattan has birthed a new acronym—WCNSF, “Wounded Child with No Surviving Family.” According to reports from several human rights organizations, 17,000 Palestinian children fall under this category. Israel’s totally disproportionate response to the Hamas attack of October 7 has become one of the most horrendous catastrophe ever visited upon a people in our lifetime.

This is being done by an Israeli government that includes “moderates” as well as far-Rightists and which openly broadcasts and even boasts about its murderous onslaught. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote,

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza—those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows—have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.

All of this is made possible by continuous U.S. arms shipments and financial aid to a government whose ministers make no secret of its desire to “clear” Gaza of its populace. As the war continues, Israeli settlers, aided by the state, have also been murdering Palestinians and taking over land in the West Bank, which has received little publicity in the global media. From October 7 to the end of March, over 7,000 West Bank Palestinians have been arrested and 1,100 killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers, leading to what some Israeli officials privately call “a volcano” ready to erupt.1

Israel’s plunge into total depravity risks setting off an even-wider regional conflagration, as it extends its attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon while even contemplating taking on Iran.

These developments clearly represent a global political turning point. Mishra does not overstate the case: “Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine.”2

Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are united when it comes to at least one thing—both insist that the peoples they are violently suppressing (Ukraine in one case, Palestine in the other) have no right to exist as national entities. For years prior to Russia’s imperialist invasion (which actually started in 2014), Putin insisted, “Ukraine is a fiction, it has never been a real nation”—the same kind of verbiage employed for decades by leading Zionists about Palestine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov let the cat out of the bag in February in stating, “Israel’s declared goals in Gaza are similar to Russia’s in Ukraine.” Ramzy Baroud, an editor of Palestine Chronicle and who supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself from Russia and also condemns the West for opposing Russia while supporting Israel’s war against Palestine responded, “Lavrov’s position is bizarre and greatly offensive…because it resembles some kind of a political nod for Israel to continue with its lethal war on Palestinian civilians without worrying about a strong Russian response.”3

Lavrov’s comment may indicate that Putin is looking ahead to a Trump presidency, which would almost certainly pull the plug on U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Toning down criticism of Israel for the sake of cementing an alliance with Trump’s white nationalism is not a big step for Putin, since he is a white nationalist himself (as is Netanyahu, who has refrained from criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

While the Ukrainians fight on, they have clearly been set back their heels in recent months by declining military support from the West. Russia on the other hand is obtaining huge amounts of armaments from Iran and North Korea while evading the impact of U.S. and EU sanctions by expanding economic links to China. Last year, China’s exports to Russia increased 54% and half of Russia’s oil was exported to China. Overall trade between the two countries has increased 64% since the 2022 invasion. As a result, Russia’s economy is expected to grow 2.6% this year, outpacing each of the major industrial economies in the G7.

If Ukraine is defeated by Russia, it will embolden the far right everywhere—not only in Europe but also in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where Putin is providing support to military regimes in Libya, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic after having enabled Bashir Assad to crush the opposition in Syria.

The global far-Right includes forces allied with U.S. imperialism and it includes forces opposed to U.S. imperialism. It is a ubiquitous political phenomenon that has deep roots in the economic morass that increasingly characterizes contemporary capitalism.

Although the global economy has avoided for now the major recession that was widely feared only a year ago, it is expected to slow for the third straight year in 2024 and is headed for its weakest half-decade since the early 1990s. Rising levels of debt and lower than average rates of labor productivity are the main culprits. And the (relatively meager) economic growth that is occurring is accompanied by ever-growing levels of inequality, as millions of rural laborers are forced off the land, rising number of migrants cross international borders in response to the impact of climate change, and tens of millions of workers worldwide are displaced by labor-saving devices (such as robotics, AI, etc.). Economic distress and insecurity are not the only factors driving the growth of the far-Right, but they are clearly one of the determinants.

The growth of the far Right is being enabled by the pitiful effort of neoliberals and social democrats to counter it. Neoliberals have no solution to the economic morass afflicting global capitalism—and this has a lot to do with why the far-Right is on the rise.

This was demonstrated on a political level earlier this year when Biden proposed a bill on “immigration reform” (supported by most Democratic and some Republican senators) that adopted virtually word for word Trump’s anti-immigrant policies—even though these same Democrats denounced them as cruel, inhumane, and racist when he was in power. Senator Chris Murphy, who helped write the bill, confessed: “They—the Republican Party—told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us in 24 hours” when Trump chose to not let Biden get credit for his own policies.

This is typical of neoliberals and social democrats everywhere: They often seek to meet rightists “halfway” by attempting to steal their thunder only to have such weakness further embolden them. Given this, it is not a stretch to recall the fate of Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s: the compromises and vacillation on the part of some claiming to support bourgeois democracy inadvertently paved the way for its destruction.

Trump and his supporters have made no secret of their plans if they win the November U.S. elections: the immediate deportation of millions of immigrants, the annulment of innumerable health and safety regulations, a push for a national ban on abortion, prohibiting discussions of race and racism in schools, gutting the NRLB to make it harder to unionize, unleashing the police against Black people, and restricting gender-affirming care for transexuals. And they have worked out detailed plans to make it harder for workers and minorities to vote—and to annul the results of any election that threatens their all-consuming drive for total state power.

Especially serious is the threat posed by climate change. Last year was officially the hottest one on record and temperatures in July broke the record as well, according to NASA.4 The Biden administration has touted its Inflation Reduction Act as key to solving the climate crisis, but its programs to develop clean energy and help workers transition to new jobs is too little and too late. It is too late because the effects of climate change are already apparent, and we may be at or very close to a tipping point of no return to “normal.” It is too little in the sense that the bill operates under a capitalist logic, providing subsidies to businesses to invest in clean energy, for example, while at the same time allowing fossil fuel production to continue.

The U.S. is now producing record amounts of fossil fuels for domestic and international markets. It has approved new drilling in Alaska, liquified natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, and greenlighted the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia,5 illustrating yet again how the needs of capital and its denizens for “cheap” oil and big profits eclipse the long-term survival of human beings.

Moreover, the Biden administration is touting the purchase of one million new electric vehicles in 2023 as a major ecological and economic success.6 Certainly, for purposes of future greenhouse gas emissions, electric cars are better than gas powered ones. However, the productivist logic remains in place. Electric cars produce less greenhouse gas in their lifetimes, but new vehicle production is still environmentally costly regardless of the type produced. More electric vehicle production is not in and of itself carbon neutral. Only by overcoming the productivist logic that greater output is inherently better for humanity and the environment will we begin to overcome this ecological crisis. That productivist logic will surely be further implemented if rightwing authoritarian nationalism consolidates its hold on state power.

Brazil offers a dramatic example the inability of neoliberalism and social democracy to counter such threats. After the coup d’état in 2016, Michel Temer and especially Jair Bolsonaro promoted a destruction of the environmental laws and institutions that have been helping to protect Brazilian forests. Bolsonaro’s administration (2016 to 2022) protected the criminals who followed his orders: the former Environmental Minister, Ricardo Salles, who was convicted of fraud against natural reserves;7 the secretary for agrarian questions, Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, onetime leader of a militia that killed 21 militants of the Landless Workers Movement (MST)8. Then, with Bolsonaro’s help, a group of landlords in the 2022 elections won most of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, even as Lula won the presidency.

Two of The Bolsonaro administration’s most iconic symbols were the “day of fire,” when a group of landlords managed to burn down large portions of the Amazon Rainforest,9 changing almost 50% of the Nature Reserves into a pasture,10 and an attempted genocide against the Yanomami people.11 After Lula of the Workers’ Party (PT) won the 2022 election, the federal government tried to help the Yanomamis by providing food, healthcare and police protection. However, the gold prospectors continued to attack and invade their lands; the efforts of the PT to end this environmental and human crisis ended up a huge failure.

The PT and Lula can try anything they want to improve environmental protections, but the landlords, many of whom are deputies in the Brazilian Congress, won’t approve any laws that don’t benefit them. It’s a kind of mafia-ization of politics. Ever since Dilma Rousseff’s administration (2011 to 2016), Brazil has witnessed a massive commodification of nature, such as with REDD+, which pays farmers to “protect” a small area of their lands. Bolsonaro further developed this law and institutionalized payment for environmental services. And now Lula is trying to approve the newest version of a Brazilian carbon market. Since most laws approved and developed by the PT to protect the environment are subsumed under the interests of capital, it becomes hard to fight back against the landlords and the far-Right trying to set fire to the Rainforest and invading the Yanomami’s land.

Massive threats also loom regarding gender and sexuality. After the Dobbs decision in the U.S., abortion is either greatly restricted or completely illegal in 23 states, making it difficult or sometimes impossible for women to get the procedure. But as was indicated by a ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court, the goal of Christian fundamentalists is much broader. Using a law that grants a fetus personhood at the moment of conception, the Court ruled that an IVF clinic was liable for the destruction of embryos stored at their facility, causing a number of clinics to close their doors until the law was clarified. After much backlash, legislators carved out an exception to fetal personhood for IVF providers. However, the concept of life originating at the moment of conception remains in place, all but eliminating women’s reproductive choice in the state. It is far from surprising that other rightwing-dominated states are looking to Alabama as a model.

Along with anti-LGBTQ legislation and violence in the U.S. we have witnessed an effort in many African nations to criminalize LGBTQ individuals. In fact, 30 of 54 countries in Africa criminalize homosexuality.12 Many of these laws date back to colonial times, yet a new wave of legislation is being enacted. Last year in Uganda, a law was passed that made “aggravated homosexuality” a capital offense. Included in this category is any sexual activity involving people with HIV,13 a policy that is not only egregious, but one that is likely to have a horrifying effect on containing the AIDS crisis as people will go without testing and treatment to avoid criminal prosecution.

In Ghana, a bill has been passed by parliament that would increase penalties for same sex acts, criminalize organizations that advocate for LGBTQ rights, and criminalize the “failure to report an LGBT person to the authorities and to report anyone who uses their social media platform to produce, publish, or disseminate content promoting activities prohibited by the bill.”14 This draconian law has been criticized by many prominent Ghanaians including Samia Nkrumah, a former member of parliament, chair of a prominent political party, and child of Kwame Nkrumah, who has called for the president to veto it.

Despite these human rights setbacks, we shouldn’t lose sight of the other side. Since 2015, six African nations have decriminalized same-sex acts.15 Moreover, despite the repression that they face, LGBTQ advocates are continuing to pressure governments to change the laws while at the same time showing their humanity to the world at large. For example, as the #Endsars protests took off in Nigeria against the brutal tactics of a special police unit, LGBTQ activists joined in, pointing out the ways in which this police unit targeted them as well. They continued to protest even as many in the #Endsars movement were openly hostile.

Also, the recent mass protests in Senegal show a democratic opening, albeit one fraught with opportunism and other dangers.16

In light of these and other crises, does the rapaciousness of today’s global capitalism-imperialism signify that we are entering the midnight of the twenty-first century—that is, a plunge into utter darkness? And what does our organization need to do and become given that question?

Part II: Subjective forces of resistance — Accomplishments and contradictions

The development that provides hope that we are not plunging into utter darkness are the massive protests worldwide against Israel’s ongoing war against Palestine. These protests, sometimes consisting of half a million at a time, have brought a new generation into the streets. Hundreds of thousands in the UK and U.S. alone, and many more worldwide, are becoming radicalized through these actions; the Israel-Palestine issue has for many become a baptism of fire for questioning existing society.

It is already having a palpable effect—as in compelling many governments, including ones that have long uncritically defended the Israeli state, to distance themselves from it by providing at least verbal support for a ceasefire to end hostilities.

The protests are facing enormous push-back, especially from those claiming that any substantive criticism of Zionism constitutes antisemitism. The latter is on the rise today and it is hardly unknown among leftists. But its most predominant expression in the U.S. is coming from the far right, whose attacks on “East Coast elites” is a not-so-veiled version of stereotypical complaints about “Jewish cosmopolitans” who allegedly control the media, finance, and education. That nothing stops such reactionaries from fully embracing Israel for serving as the U.S.’s major military partner in the Middle East shows that support for it long ago ceased to have much to do with defending Jews.17

In the U.S., where this new McCarthyism is strongest (and has even toppled the president of Harvard University), opposition to it is being led by some courageous intellectuals, which owes a lot to the solidarity of Black intellectuals with the Palestinians and for democratic rights. Labor unions and Black churches have also spoken out courageously, in contrast to the shameful silence of the heads of universities, the cultural establishment, and the NGO sector, dependent as they are on corporate and state support. Also of note is the solidarity of two countries that have experienced forms of colonialism that blatantly touted ethno-racial domination, South Africa and Ireland.

Even more important has been the steely resilience of the people of Gaza. To date, there has been not one report of a Gazan turning in a Hamas hideout or hostage location, something Israel surely would have bragged about had it occurred. Many Gazans remain in or keep returning to the center and the north, despite the danger, in order to continue claiming their homes and land. This is rooted in a deep sense of national solidarity and the refusal of a people to be extinguished. The social formations involved at the village level deserve notice here. As Peter Linebaugh has shown, the Palestinian people have for centuries maintained a communal system of land tenure and village self-administration—similar to what Karl Marx described in his late writings on Russia—which they have retained, albeit in weakened form, through British and Israeli occupation.18

Even as we condemn Hamas’s indiscriminate violence on October 7, it is clear that it changed utterly the world situation, placing the decades-long resistance of the Palestinian people back on the agenda, not only as a factor the imperialist powers cannot count out, but also for the global mass movements for social justice and liberation.19 From the U.S. to France and from Germany to the UK, the new movements of and for the Palestinian people have exposed, in ways not seen in decades, the bankruptcy of so-called “liberal democracy” and especially what remains of reformist social democracy, whose leaders, from UK Labor Party leader Keir Starmer even to “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, have refrained from a strong, unequivocal support for Palestine even in this hour of genocide, all the while trumpeting support for Ukraine.

Despite the enormous destruction Israel continues to wreak upon Gaza—the ramifications of which will be felt for years and even decades to come—one thing is clear: Israel has lost the battle of ideas. Once that happens to any regime, it is only a matter of time before it loses the battle in material terms.

In the Call for our 2022 Convention, we called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 of that year a global turning point. It was a geopolitical turning point, since it initiated a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S., the solidification of a Russo-Chinese axis, and resulted in a refurbished and expanded NATO following Russia’s invasion. Israel’s response to Hamas’s brutal attack of Oct. 7 also marks a global turning point—but not only in terms of geopolitics. It also marks a potential subjective turning point, since Israel’s actions has been met with a mobilization of millions that is breathing new life into social movements around the world.

This is reflected in the support extended to Palestinians by many Indigneous people, Latinx and Blacks in the U.S. and elsewhere. The issues raised by the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—especially the police murder of young people of color—may be less visible in 2024, but they are smoldering under the surface, especially given the fact that both Trumpist fascists and mainstream liberals have blocked the passage of laws that would in any meaningful way restrain the police or even limit their budget.

The counterattack against BLM got seriously underway by 2022, with vicious campaigns against the teaching of Critical Race Theory or the use of books like The 1619 Project in schools. Although these anti-racist efforts may have limitations, such as their tendency to downplay the significance of capital and class, it’s important to note that they are not being targeted by racist reactionaries for this reason. Instead, they are outraged that these educational tools, which dare to speak of “systemic racism,” are moving the public discourse toward a more historical and materialist interpretation. Black intellectuals have been at the forefront of this struggle and have paid the price. This was seen in how the rightwing was able to force the resignation of so highly placed a person as Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to hold that post. This was accomplished by an unholy alliance of neoliberal cheerleaders for the State of Israel and reactionary racists complaining of alterations in the curriculum and affirmative action.

Outside the universities, a key development in the Black struggle in the U.S. has been the new Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Reverends William Barber and Liz Theoharis. Their call for a Third Reconstruction states, “We must simultaneously deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”20 Similarly, Black legislators in California introduced a groundbreaking reparations bill aimed at providing compensation to the descendants of enslaved Black individuals. The proposed measures encompass affirmative action initiatives to combat poverty and enhance educational achievements, restitution for families affected by discriminatory policies leading to property loss, the prohibition of forced prison labor, and the allocation of resources to community-driven alternatives to traditional policing methods.21

The searing anger in impoverished communities of color burned its way to the surface in another bourgeois democracy, France, as seen in the June-July 2023 urban insurrection. In the wake of police killing Nahel Merzouk, an unarmed 17-year-old of North African descent, youth expressed their outrage toward both the police and the system, staging 240 attacks on police or gendarme stations and injuring 700 police officers. What France’s leading newspaper called “an unprecedented” level of destruction is a sign of the times, and not just in France.22

These and other ongoing struggles have the potential to develop into movements and campaigns that oppose occupation, repression, and racial exclusion wherever they occur. Potential, however, is not the same as actuality. We are still a long way from an anti-capitalist alternative which opposes all form of capitalism-imperialism—whether generated by the U.S. or its adversaries—on behalf of universal human emancipation.

One sign of this is that many leftists oppose Ukraine’s fight for its national existence because the U.S and EU have provided it with arms—at least until recently.23 It is of course completely hypocritical for the West to send weapons to aid Ukraine’s fight for self-determination while providing Israel with weapons to suppress Palestine’s fight for self-determination. But it is no less hypocritical to take their ground by supporting the national liberation of the struggle of Palestine but not Ukraine. It is surely possible to defend the right of those resisting imperialism to get arms from wherever they can without endorsing either its leaders (Zelensky in the case of Ukraine, Hamas in the case of Palestine) or the regime that supplies them (the U.S. with Ukraine, Iran and Qatar with Palestine).24

At issue here is not simply taking “the right political position” but the fate of a humanist alternative to capitalism. It cannot be advanced by opposing U.S. imperialism while writing a blank check for Russian imperialism; nor can it be advanced by doing the reverse. sSerious revolutionaries don’t get to pick and choose which forms of statist oppression are more agreeable than others. Refraining from targeting all forms of class society necessarily results in an impoverished vision of human emancipation.

It therefore bears noting that the parts of the organized Left that is presently growing most rapidly are Marxist-Leninists and other vanguardist tendencies. In a way this is understandable: the move of many leftists into social democracy has become highly problematic given political developments in recent years. But that does not mean it isn’t a problem.

In this context, as many are returning to the writings of V.I. Lenin, it is important to note what his real contribution was: Though he is known for his many contributions as a revolutionary leader, his deep study of Hegel from 1914-1915 marked a turning point in his intellectual development. Through this study, Lenin moved beyond the confines of mechanical materialism, embracing dialectical principles like “transformation into opposite” that would inform his theory of imperialism. Lenin’s dialectical understanding enabled him to grasp the contradictions inherent in imperialism, particularly the emergence of new forms of oppression and resistance from outside the European working classes. Imperialism had created an internal differentiation of the proletariat in oppressor and oppressed nations and the need to connect their struggles for a successful social revolution. Through his analysis, Lenin illuminated the interconnectedness of class struggle and national liberation, laying the groundwork for a revolutionary praxis that transcended the Marxist orthodoxy of the Second International. His writings provide unique insight into the aspirations of oppressed groups striving for an alternative to capitalism. For Marxist-Humanists in an era marked by resurgent imperialism and colonialism, Lenin’s original contributions to dialectics and analysis of imperialism remain as relevant as ever. Nevertheless, while Lenin, as well as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, deserve to be studied anew, their limitations as “post-Marx Marxists, as pejorative,” also needs to be discussed in depth.

What also bears noting is the reactionary character of Middle Eastern states and militias that trumpet their support of the Palestinian resistance, as does the kind of conservative nationalism represented by Hamas, which originated as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.25 These forces, which are key components of what Iran calls the Axis of Resistance, are reactionary and fundamentalist in their internal politics: the Houthi regime in northern Yemen that is attacking Red Sea shipping, the counter-revolutionary Syrian regime, and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iranian regime, both of which played major roles in repressing the Syrian revolution.

It should not be forgotten that the Islamic Republic of Iran experienced a near revolution in fall 2022. Young women and members of the Kurdish and Baluchi oppressed minorities spearheaded this movement, which was touched off by the police murder of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, for not covering her hair to their satisfaction (improper hijab). Despite massive repression, women have carved out hijab-free public spaces in the cities that they and youth continue to defend over a year later. In an interview smuggled out from prison on the occasion of International Women’s Day, leading feminist and Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi declared, “The Iranian people have turned the page on this regime,” adding that “women constitute the most radical, the most powerful, and the most widely engaged force opposing the authoritarian theocracy.”26 Along with oppressed minorities and the working class, they may yet give the regime another jolt, even as it attempts to identify itself with the Palestinian resistance. Again, this shows that there are two worlds in every country, that of the dominant classes and that of the working classes and oppressed groups.

If the global left and Palestinian support movement fail to take note of reactionary character of the regimes in Syria, Yemen, Iran and elsewhere, this will muddy the waters about what kind of resistance can actually lead toward genuine liberation, toward a humanist alternative to capitalism.

Since our founding in 2009, we have argued that the central problem facing today’s struggles is the absence of a viable alternative to all forms of capitalism—whether statist or “free market.” Much of our theoretical work has been devoted to this issue, such as the publication of a revised translation with an extensive commentary of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. But how do we promote such an alternative in the face of the growing power of the far-Right, the ongoing genocides in Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar, etc., and the likelihood that the ecological crisis may soon (if it has not already) reach the point of no return? Speculating about “what happens after the revolution” when revolution seems nowhere in sight can readily fall on deaf ears. So, what exactly must we do as an organization in response?

Central to this is showing that a viable concept of the transcendence of capitalist alienation is not a matter of speculating about some distant utopia but is urgently needed to adequately respond to the most pressing political realities. When an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination recedes from view, what results in the long run is an accommodation to the limits of the given.

To be sure, it is part of our “organizational DNA” to support grassroots movements and stress the importance of horizontal, grassroots forms of organization. But that by itself does not address the problem of how to fill the void in articulating an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination.

This is why our founder, Raya Dunayevskaya, stressed, “Yes, the party and the forms of organization born from spontaneity are opposites, but they are not absolute opposites…the absolute opposite is philosophy, and that we have not yet worked out organizationally.”27

This was part and parcel of her insistence, “Without such a vision of new revolutions, new individual, a new universal, a new society, new human relations, we would be forced to tailend one or another form of reformism.”28 Today we might add, and/or forced to tailend one or another form of abstract revolutionism. Radicals that cannot find room in their hearts and minds for opposing dehumanized conditions of life wherever they exist are abstract revolutionists. Needed is a concrete universalism that is rooted in all forces of revolution and their reason.

Part III: Organizational tasks and challenges facing the IMHO

Despite these contradictions, there are signs of a growing recognition of the need for a humanist alternative to capitalism. This is reflected in several new works discussing the work of Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanist philosophy.29 One recent essay in a major leftwing journal states,

Marxist and socialist humanism have had a lasting impact on how we think about autonomy, social transformation, and radical democracy … Today, the influence of Marxist humanism, particularly as developed by Dunayevskaya’s merging of philosophy and practice, as well as her intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender formulated long before intersectionality came into vogue, are to be traced in such organizations as the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.30

Such discussions testify to the impact, admittedly still modest, that the publication of the collection Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism is beginning to have.31 Of course, these reconsiderations of Marx’s humanism hardly predominate. And for a basic reason: the radical intellectual horizon for the last 40 years, inside and outside of academia, has been defined by the disparagement of any form of humanism. The tendency to conflate bourgeois or Enlightenment humanism with Marxist Humanism is ubiquitous, as are claims that Marx left behind any “residual” humanism when he turned his attention to the critique of political economy, that humanism reeks of “speciesism,” or that a universalist perspective focusing on the transformation of human relations is necessarily hierarchical and oppressive.32 It goes without saying that such conceptions have direct political ramifications, as noted (in part) above.

Hence, our foremost goal as an organization is to work out how we can raise a revolutionary humanist banner within today’s movements—and do so in a way that will convince those drawn to such a perspective to join and help build our organization.

As of now the IMHO publishes a web journal, The International Marxist-Humanist, and at times holds public or zoom meetings on political and theoretical topics. Far rarer do its members come together at rallies and other events to distribute our flyers and literature and invite people to our upcoming events. As a result, many do not view us as an actual organization…because in some ways we have yet to become one.

This doesn’t mean members of the IMHO aren’t involved in important work. Vital activity has been done promoting our ideas at conferences, publications, and podcasts; the same is true when it comes to activity in Palestine and/or Ukraine solidarity, prisoner support, labor solidarity, and care work. But we are largely doing so as individuals rather than presenting ourselves as an organized tendency that poses an alternative to other variants of Marxism.

The operational goal of our 2024 convention is to work out how to move from individuals grouped around a website to becoming a real organization that can continue Marxist-Humanism. The latter is by no means assured. Ideas don’t live and develop on their own. They need living people to embody them, to commit their lives to, otherwise, they become mere footnotes to history.

There are objective barriers standing in the way of assuming such organizational responsibility. We were determined to form an international organization when we moved to create the IMHO in 2009. That we achieved this is our greatest strength, but it also means we are dispersed and rarely get together. That is why attendance at our bi-annual Conventions is vital for every member.

There are also the barriers of everyday life, where we face many obligations and responsibilities that means we must choose what commitments to prioritize and emphasize. This is important given that bourgeois society overburdens some communities more than others, such as workers, women, Trans, and BIPOC communities. This is why we strive to create a space where we can continue to challenge any and all manifestations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and classism inside as well as outside the organization.

Are we willing take the responsibility to maintain and build such an organization? The major barrier facing us is one that afflicts all revolutionary groups that reject the model of a vanguard party. Vanguardists have no problem explaining why others need to join their group—after all, a revolutionary seizure of power “needs leadership” and they are there to provide it. It is harder to get across the necessity for an organized revolutionary group to exist that rejects such an elitist view. This is one reason why anti-vanguardist currents (whether Marxist or anarchist) either do not last long or become insular sects (as News and Letters Committees has become).

A clear example is C.L.R James: though he was surely a serious theoretician, after breaking from vanguardism he failed to explain why an organization of Marxists needs to exist apart from the spontaneous struggles. And the reason he failed to do so is that he recoiled from making the transition from state-capitalist theory to Marxist Humanist philosophy.33 Hence, though he had a small organization following his and Grace Lee Boggs’s break with Dunayevskaya in 1955, it dissolved in the late 1960s just as the mass movements were reaching their peak and a new generation of activists were joining Marxist organizations en masse. In a way, the dissolution of James’s group makes perfect sense: what basis is there in the end to have an organization if it lacks a philosophy of its own and sees its goal simply celebrating the movements and their revolutionary creativity?

In many respects, James’ failure to sustain an alternative form of organization was anticipated in his most important theoretical work—Notes on Dialectics (written in 1948). In rejecting the concept of the vanguard party, he held, “The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop, spontaneity—the free creative activity of the proletariat.” He went so far as to envision “the abolition of the party.”34 So, what kind of organization would replace it? He envisions a mass party along the lines of decentralized formations like the soviets during the Russian Revolution—one created by the spontaneous actions of the masses. No role was specified for an organization of Marxist theoreticians and activists even though he was a member of one.

This lack of specificity was not just James’s problem. It is ours. Marxist-Humanism has made great theoretical strides; having them become embodied and developed organizationally remains our most unfinished task.

History does have a way of repeating itself, but we surely do not want to repeat the history of what happened to James’ organization—any more than we want to repeat the history of News and Letters Committees after Dunayevskaya’s death, when it turned Marxist-Humanist philosophy into a stale ideology.35 This is why we say that the greatest gift we can offer to those joining the IMHO is to take part in the development of a philosophy of liberation—which means working out, consciously and critically, one’s own conception of the world, and in connection with the labor of others, taking an active part in the creation of the history of a new world.1

Jean-Philippe Rémy, “Cisjordanie: l’autre guerre menée par Israel,” Le Monde, Jan. 31, 2024.
2

“The Shoah After Gaza,” by Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, March 7, 2024.
3

See “Sergey Lavrov and Vulgar Anti-Imperialism,” by Howie Hawkins, Against the Current, March 2, 2024 https://againstthecurrent.org/atc229/sergey-lavrov-and-vulgar-anti-imperialism/
4

Bardan, Roxana. “NASA Analysis Confirms 2023 as Warmest Year on Record,” January 12, 2024. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-analysis-confirms-2023-as-warmest-year-on-record/
5

Hu, Akielly. “What it might look like if President Biden really declared a climate emergency,” August 14, 2023. https://grist.org/climate-energy/what-it-might-look-like-if-president-biden-really-declared-a-climate-emergency/
6

“FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Takes Action to Accelerate America’s Clean Transportation Future,” December 14, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/12/14/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-action-to-accelerate-americas-clean-transportation-future/
7

“Ricardo Salles foi condenado por fraude em plano de manejo,” by Sabrina Rodrigues, Oeco, Dec. 20, 2018, https://oeco.org.br/noticias/ricardo-salles-foi-condenado-por-fraude-em-plano-de-manejo
8

See https://mst.org.br/2018/10/26/o-que-e-a-udr-e-quem-e-nabhan-garcia-cotado-para-ser-ministro-de-bolsonaro/ and also https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2018/11/26/entidades-ligadas-ao-campo-denunciam-influencia-da-udr-no-governo-bolsonaro-entenda
9

“O que se sabe sobre o ‘Dia do Fogo’, momento-chave das queimadas na Amazônia,” by Leandro Machado, BBC News Brasil, Aug. 27, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-49453037
10

“Dia do Fogo, “Tres anos depois: mais de metade da florista queimada na Amazonia viour pasto,” by B.A. Garridoi, Infoamazonia, April 24, 2023, https://infoamazonia.org/2023/08/04/dia-do-fogo-tres-anos-depois-mais-da-metade-da-floresta-queimada-na-amazonia-virou-pasto/.
11

“Sob Bolsonaro, mortes de yanomami por desnutrição cresceram 331%” by João Fellet e Leandro Prazeres, BBC News Brasil, Feb. 17, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cw011x9rpldo
12

Muhumuza, Rodney. “Uganda’s new anti-gay legislation includes death sentence in some cases,” May 29, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ugandas-new-anti-gay-legislation-includes-death-sentence-for-in-some-cases
13

Ibid.
14

Nantulya, Carine Kaneza. “Ghana’s Leaders Push Back on Anti-LGBT Bill,” March 12, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/12/ghanas-leaders-push-back-anti-lgbt-bill
15

Ferragamo, Mariel and Kali Robinson. “Where African countries stand in their struggle toward more inclusive LGBTQ+ laws,” June 18, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/where-african-countries-stand-in-their-struggle-toward-more-inclusive-lgbtq-laws
16

See “Standing in Solidarity With Senegal,” by Ba Karang, The International Marxist-Humanist, March 17, 2024, https://imhojournal.org/articles/standing-in-solidarity-with-senegal/
17

For more on this, see “Challenging the New McCarthyism: Charges of Antisemitism Weaponized,” by Peter Hudis, Against the Current, March-April 2024, https://againstthecurrent.org/atc229/charges-of-antisemitism-weaponized/
18

Peter Linebaugh, “Palestine and the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a,” Counterpunch, March 1, 2024 https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/01/palestine-the-commons-or-marx-the-mushaa/
19

See the statement issued by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization within days of the Oct. 7 attack, “The Middle East and the World After October 7, and Israel’s War on Palestine, by Kevin Anderson, https://imhojournal.org/articles/the-middle-east-and-the-world-after-october-7-and-israels-war-on-palestine/
20

See https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/join-us-as-we-build-the-third-reconstruction/
21

Austin, Sophie. “California lawmakers say reparations bills, which exclude widespread payments, are a starting point,” February 21, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-compensation-slavery-c3b8d7a4de973adf218b93e396af8fe1
22

Antoine Albertini and Luc Bronner, “Violences: Un bilan sans précédent,” Le Monde, July 4, 2023.
23

For example, the “March on the DNC” group organizing protests at the Democratic Party Convention in August lists opposing aid to Ukraine among its demands. See https://www.marchondnc2024.org/our-demands
24

See the statement by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) of February 24, 2024, “From Ukraine to Palestine: Occupation is a Crime!” https://linktr.ee/ukrainesolidaritynetwork
25

On this, see Joseph Daher, “On the Origins and Development of Hamas,” Tempest, December 27, 2023 https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/12/on-the-origins-and-development-of-hamas/ and more generally Gilbert Achcar, Israel’s War on Gaza (London: Resistance Books, 2023).
26

Ghazal Golshiri, “Voix des dissidents jaillies de prisons d’Iran,” Le Monde, March 1, 2024
27

“Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy” in The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2002), p. 9.
28

Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (University of Illinois Press, [1982] 1991), p. 194.
29

See especially “The Self-Education of Rae Speigel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of Great Migrations,” by W. Chris Johnson, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 17 (1) 2024, pp. 127-54; “She-Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya: Forgotten Comrade of Left-Wing Intellectuals,” by Sofya Nikiforova and Yekaterina Mikheyeva, Journal of the Higher School of Mathematics, Vol. 6 (4), 2023, pp. 84-104; and “’A Way of Knowing: Adrienne Rich’s Marxism and the Poetics of Revolution,” by Megan Behrent, Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 78 (2), 2022, pp. 13-42.
30

“Humanism and Post-Humanism,” by Sunyoung Ayn, Historical Materialism, 31.1, 2023, pp. 68-9.
31

See Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, edited by Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, and Heather A. Brown (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
32

For a fine critique of the latter two claims, see “Humanism: A Defense,” by Karen Ng, Philosophical Topics, Vol. 49 (1) Spring 2021, pp. 145-63.
33

See Dunayevskaya’s Introduction to the 1988 edition of Marxism and Freedom, from 1775 Until Today (Columbia University Press) entitled “Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and Marx’s World Humanist Concepts”: “When, in the 1950’s Miners’ General Strike, I again used Marx’s Humanist Essays—and my own activity showed the beginning of Marxist-Humanism—C.L.R James also recoiled from Marx’s Humanism” (p. 2) [emphasis in original 1985 speech].
34

Notes on Dialectics, by C.L.R. James (Lawrence Hill, 1980), pp. 117, 141.
35

See “Towards an Organizational History of the Philosophy of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.,” by Peter Hudis, The International Marxist-Humanist, September 8, 2009, https://imhojournal.org/articles/towards-an-organizational-history-of-the-philosophy-of-marxist-humanism-in-the-u-s/

Ukraine’s fight for freedom: A socialist case for solidarity and self‑determination

Paul Le Blanc
8 May, 2024

The text is based on a talk that Le Blanc delivered on April 15, 2024. 

First published at Anti*Capitalist Resistance.




It is necessary for those who support socialism and democracy to support Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion of their country. Here I want to offer some historical and political background as to why I think this is so.

There have been many economic, political, and cultural similarities between Russia and Ukraine – in part because Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire since the reign of Catherine the Great in the late 1700s. The Russian Empire was long known by revolutionaries as “a prison-house of nations” precisely because it was made up of the gradual conquest and forced absorption of multiple nations and peoples into an expanding territory dominated by the powerful, violent authoritarian monarchy of the Tsars.

The economy was initially a form of feudalism, in which a mass of peasants were brutally exploited by a wealthy minority of hereditary land-owning nobles, supported by the Tsarist regime. In the course of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, the Tsars also sought to advance a process of capitalist industrialization throughout the Empire, to make Russia more competitive – economically and militarily – in the global power struggles of the time.

This had the unintended consequence, however, of helping to generate socialist and labor movements that were increasingly drawn to the banner of Marxism, and which culminated in the Communist revolution of 1917 led by Lenin and his comrades which – after a three-year civil war – replaced both feudalism and capitalism with what many hoped would blossom into a socialist economy. Instead, as the regime of Lenin gave way to that of Joseph Stalin, a bureaucratic-authoritarian order dominated most of what had been the Russian Empire, including what is now Russia and now Ukraine. A state-controlled “Command Economy” drove forward, through brutal means, the modernization of the economy of what became known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR).

Despite the economic gains of this new system, it was beset by deep-rooted contradictions and instabilities. These were related to the oppressiveness of the bureaucratic system, with its systematic violations of human rights and popular aspirations; it was also related to ongoing hostility and economic rivalry from highly advanced capitalist sections of the world. Such problems and pressures eventually led to the collapse of the economic and political system of the USSR. One aspect of this collapse was a resurgent nationalism which caused the break-away of oppressed territories out of the old “prison-house of nations,” leading for example to the independence of Ukraine in 1991. The collapse also involved elements in the upper strata of the bureaucratic dictatorship embracing a transition back to capitalism, while taking what had been publicly owned resources and wealth into their own hands. The rise of these capitalist “Oligarchs” occurred throughout the disintegrating USSR – in Ukraine and Russia alike. The economy of both has been privatized, giving rise to domination by these self-interested economic oligarchs. This is combined with breath-taking corruption and soaring inequality, at the expense of the great majority of Russians and Ukrainians. Such capitalism, in the period of the Russia-Ukraine war, is the dominant mode of production on both sides.

Some elements in the nationalist resurgence in the former USSR had connection with old versions of extreme right-wing, authoritarian, racist (often antisemitic) nationalism prevalent throughout Eastern Europe – very much including in Ukraine and Tsarist Russia. While this was antithetical to Marxist and Communist ideology, since the collapse of Communism it has sometimes taken the form of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi ideologies and organizations, particularly on the war front, and on both sides. Serious analysts, however, note that this is marginal – as would make sense, given the horrific experience of the murderous Nazi onslaught during World War II.

On the other hand, there are significant differences between the Putin and Zelensky regimes — as well as one significant similarity: that neither is worthy of socialist support.

We can look first at Russia. When Boris Yeltsin displaced the reforming Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to the destruction of the USSR, he introduced transition policies marked by corruption, chaos, and the downward spiral of the economy and of Russian living standards. This was accompanied by the ballooning power of the Oligarchs.

Out of this catastrophic situation, Vladimir Putin came to power, imposing a so-called “managed democracy” and a regulated capitalism. The Oligarchs were cut down to size, forced to follow new rules set by Putin’s state.

Putin and those close to him were able to secure their hold of colossal wealth, but in order to justify the increased centralization of political power and to provide an ideological rationale for an increasingly unified Russian state, they voiced the conservative ideals from the old Tsarist order: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. By “Orthodoxy” such ideologists referred to the dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church. By “Autocracy” they referred to a despotic regime that does not tolerate challenges to its authority and makes use of brutally violent Cossacks and other repressive forces to intimidate critics and crush all serious dissent. By “Nationality” they referred to the aggressive domination of a vast empire in which all ethnic groups were to abandon their distinctive cultures and languages, adopting instead those of a unified Great Russia. Putin has explained his outlook in terms such as these.

One source of Putin’s power he owed to his largely (but not entirely) inept predecessor Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin found himself challenged, in his inegalitarian and corrupt policies of capitalist transition, by a semi-democratic parliament established in the wake of Communism’s collapse. With support from the army, he rode roughshod over Russia’s parliament, finally physically assaulting it and ordering its dissolution. He pushed through a new constitution that created an authoritarian executive branch of government to enable him to rule by decree. This paved the way for Putin’s later mode of operation, prevalent today.

This kind of political centralization and authoritarianism did not crystallize in Ukraine, although as Yuliya Yurchenko tells us an “authoritarian neoliberal kleptocracy” – not brought to heal by a figure like Putin – has continued to shape policies in Ukraine, at the expense of a majority of the country’s laboring people. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption platform, yet the assessment of the Zelensky government offered by Social Movement activist Vladyslav Starodubtsev is shared by many Ukrainian socialists:

Even before the war, this has been one of the most popular governments Ukraine has had — which is not saying anything good about it, it was just not as awful as the previous ones. Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People, has become the most progressive party in parliament on social issues such as LGBTQ rights, opposing violence against women, and so on. But most of these policies have been promoted with European integration in mind, and not because the party is itself progressive.

On the economic front, Zelensky’s party has a market fundamentalist orientation, adopting neoliberal legislation to deregulate labor relations, which has weakened the power of collective labor contracts and trade unions. Due to its market fundamentalist outlook, it views trade unions and any form of economic democracy as harmful to economic development.

We also must consider the global framework of the conflict, which involves the centrality of imperialism to world politics. Those who believe in socialism and democracy — rule by the people over our economic and political life — must oppose it. By imperialism, I am referring to military and/or political and/or economic expansion beyond the borders of one’s own country for the purpose of ensuring the well-being of one’s economy, including the need to secure markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. US imperialism is a reality in our world. This has been so at least since the 1890s, although it could be argued that this has been the case since the 1790s. But neither Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg saw imperialism as representing a single evil country, but rather all countries in our epoch — oppressed by competing and contending elites of the so-called “Great Powers” — and reflecting the capitalist dynamics of the global economy. Both Lenin and Luxemburg saw imperialism as very much including both the US and Russia. That remains the case today.

Focusing for a moment on US imperialism, one must understand that a key imperialist instrument is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is a military alliance designed in 1949 to contain and push back the threat to capitalist interests represented by the Soviet Union and possible revolutionary insurgencies. Yet another instrument of capitalist expansion and stability has been the European Union (EU). Both NATO and the EU figure into a shrewd analysis developed by political scientist John Mearsheimer, an influential critic of recent US foreign policy. He asserts that US policymakers “have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border.” He sees NATO expansion and EU expansion as seeking to make Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, at the expense of Russian power interests.

There are irreconcilable differences between Mearsheimer’s liberal-realist outlook and the revolutionary socialist approach of Lenin, which influences my own approach. I want to conclude by describing what amounts to a debate between Mearsheimer and Lenin.

Mearsheimer notes that the US power elite, when finding itself in a similar situation to that of Putin today, has overthrown “democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave.” He sees as reasonable, therefore, Putin’s desire “to install in Kyiv a pro-Russian government, a government that is attuned to Moscow’s interests.” He believes that the US government and the Russian government can and should negotiate in way that respects each other’s “interests,” and work out a compromise consistent with those interests.

Lenin’s revolutionary Marxist approach is different from that of Mearsheimer. He emphasizes the reality of class conflict, refusing to blur all classes together with the governments of their specific countries. The foreign policies of the “great powers” are always in the interest of privileged and wealthy elites, and at the expense of the laboring majorities. He absolutely rejects the right of “great powers” to insist on having their way.

Mearsheimer tells us: “In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy. But,” he admonishes, “in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way.”

No, Lenin responds. In an ideal world, the Ukrainians would have the right to self-determination – for a free and independent Ukraine, for political and economic democracy and a decent life for all. True, in the “real world” such things are not feasible. But instead of bowing to one’s oppressor, one should demand “the impossible” and fight to make what is “ideal” the new reality. This will mean fighting against Putin’s invasion, just as it will mean fighting against Zelensky’s neoliberalism. And one thing more – among “the Russians” there are people like us who hunger for political and economic democracy and a decent life for all. And there are such people among the Western Europeans, among the peoples of the Americas and Asia and Africa. The struggle must include all of us if we are to have a truly ideal world.

I want to add a couple of extra minutes to my presentation in order to take up an important question. Where will Ukrainian freedom fighters get their arms? They will get their arms wherever they can, however they can – otherwise their fight for freedom will inevitably go down to bloody defeat at the hands of their oppressors.

This life-or-death question has come up time and again down through history. And freedom fighters sometimes acquire such arms from rivals of their oppressors, even from sources representing the opposite of what one is fighting for.

One of many examples can be found in the American Revolution of 1775-83.1 Money, arms and direct military support from the French monarchy helped anti-colonial revolutionaries of North America to break free from the British monarchy. Some argue that imperialist powers provide such assistance to manipulate the situation for their own advantage. Absolutely — that is what imperialists always do. But revolutionaries and freedom fighters also seek to manipulate the situation for the advantage of their cause.

This leads to my final point. It would have been a mistake for American revolutionaries, in exchange for French assistance, to violate revolutionary principles by integrating themselves into the French Empire — just as it would be a mistake for revolutionaries of today to integrate themselves into NATO. But it is not a mistake, in a life and death struggle, for freedom fighters to accept weapons from either the French monarchy of 1778 or from nations belonging to NATO today. If the cause of revolutionaries and freedom fighters is just, they will be inclined to struggle for victory by any means necessary.
Paul Le Blanc is the author of works on the labour and socialist movements, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (1990), From Marx to Gramsci (1996), and Leon Trotsky (2015). He is an editor of the eight-volume International Encyclopaedia of Revolution and Protest, and a co-editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

Ukrainians and Palestinians are fighting occupation

Terrell Starr
Vladyslav Starodubtsev
Rita Adel
16 May, 2024

First published at Black Diplomat.

Terrell Starr speaks with two Ukrainians who support Palestine, humanitarian analyst Rita Adel and socialist historian Vladyslav Starodubtsev, about why they feel it is important for their countrymen and women to understand colonialism in other parts of the world.

They talked about Ukrainian socialism, what progressives in the west do not get about Ukraine and NATO and why Ukrainians are not privileged because they are “white.”